Udea

THE GOAL

As the definitive Dutch wholesaler of organic foods, natural personal care products and sustainable non-food items, Udea’s ambition is to set the standard and lead the way in the organic products world. This comes down to inspired leadership, smart choices and a long-term, sustainable vision.

The company – which is the franchisor for the Marqt and Ekoplaza chains of organic supermarkets – names transparency as its core value and a key aspiration for its supply-chain management is the ability to connect growers and consumers. By communicating with suppliers, Udea is able to ensure a fair price for growers – which forms the basis for the eventual consumer price.

To achieve the best possible pricing strategy, Udea is redesigning its IT landscape and turned to low-code and no-code solutions experts CLEVR to develop an innovative pricing tool.

THE APPROACH

The solution needed to be as scalable and flexible as possible, so it can be adjusted as and when Udea’s needs change.

The company has a basic enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and a large, flexible layer of different applications, including price management, sits around this.

Gartner’s Pace Layered Application Strategy was chosen as the foundation for the new IT landscape design, with Mendix as a low-code platform within the ‘systems of differentiation’ layer. Applications developed on Mendix are ‘floating’ at a tactical level and can be deployed and improved as needed.

The challenge to develop a pricing tool was considerable. Every year, Udea handles more than 13,000 active items and around 5,500 price changes. A sales price has to be calculated for each and every one of these items. This is done by retrieving purchase prices and master data from the product information management (PIM) and ERP systems, which is then passed on to the pricing tool. The tool calculates the correct sales price from this information. In the process, it also takes into account Udea’s various clients, as different sales prices apply for its B2B customers and its consumers.

THE RESULTS

Udea was already using CLEVR’s Promotion Manager application with great results and also liked working with the Mendix platform, thanks to its flexibility, so the decision to work with CLEVR on a pricing tool was an easy one.

The company needed a special tool developed because its ERP doesn’t have the right functionalities to let it build up the right price or allow for price differentiation. The Gartner model and flexible Mendix platform proved to be the ideal solution.

CLEVR understood the market demand for the pricing tool and worked closely with Udea to develop it, taking on board the company’s vision and requirements to create exactly what was needed. As well as standard features required for compiling a price, it also has plenty of scope for developing custom-made features.

Data communication is also one of the most important aspects of the pricing tool. Exchange of data from open systems, which are linked to the tool to make the information supply as complete as possible for any given price, occurs in real time, so prices are always up-to-date.

The new pricing tool is just one more way that those working at Udea can feel they’re making the world a little bit better every day.