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It's no secret that the construction industry is mainly impacted by inflation and price increases, but why are dealers the first to be affected? Discover our solution to update your prices easily from Unifai.
The construction industry is a very broad sector that includes the construction, repair and maintenance of buildings and structures. B2B distributors, also known as "merchants", play a crucial role in the supply chain of this sector. Dealers provide materials and products at competitive rates and play a vital role in the construction industry.
While material prices are up 26% in Q3 2022, more than two-thirds of B2B distributors report that they have increased their prices.
Unifai helps building trades to update their prices easily via an automated workflow. Discover the reasons for this inflation of the sector and the impacts of a poorly performed and/or too long price update.
It is no secret that the construction industry is mainly impacted by inflation and price increases, but why are the dealers the first ones concerned?
In fact, apart from raw materials and small parts specific to each business need, traders do not offer services. Therefore, they cannot adjust their prices through other activities. Their only source of income is the sale of these raw materials. Being dependent on the prices of their suppliers, they have few solutions to limit the increase of their prices.
The role of a trade is to supply many craftsmen of the BTP, such as plumbers, joiners, electricians, tilers, masons, carpenters, etc. They therefore provide access to a very large number of products. Nevertheless, beyond the price increase, we have many supply problems. The shortage of certain raw materials pushes the traders to increase the prices of the products they manage to obtain.
Building supply companies need to be able to provide products and materials at more competitive rates than traditional retailers, which saves building tradesmen time and money. Trade customers are therefore looking for the best prices, but it is sometimes impossible, as it is now, for B2B distributors to match the competition in terms of price and supply.
To understand in more detail the benefits of AI for retailer pricing updates, please read our dedicated article "Purchasing department: optimizing time with artificial intelligence".
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Your prices need to be constantly updated on your site. However, when pricing managers update them manually, it can be tedious and time consuming. In addition, this mission becomes necessary and prevents pricing teams from being productive on more value-added missions. You may be selling your product at the wrong price, but you may also have purchased it at the wrong price. To verify this, pricing teams have to go back and manually review invoices to ensure that no errors have been made.
Prices have increased, but if the usual discounts that customers are entitled to are not displayed because the price update is defective, they may be greatly disappointed. Sometimes they don't even ask questions and prefer to go to the competition. While some will contact customer service who will have to go and deal with this additional technical problem and restore their confidence.
Without the application of price discounts, the trader must therefore resell his product at full price. This is not the easiest thing to do. Many contracts can then be lost and this will directly impact the margin and cash flow of the B2B distributor.
Discover how a player in the building industry like Algorel categorized 30K products in 1 month with Unifai? Download Algorel's case study.
Therefore, retailers need to centralize the reception of tariff files and automate their integration simply.
For this, Unifai can intervene via an automated workflow:
All suppliers centralize their pricing files via the Unifai portal. They fill in the mandatory information and indicate the discounted lines/products. During this step, your pricing team does not intervene.
The pricing assistants retrieve the files corrected by the suppliers directly from the Unifai platform. They in turn use Unifai to standardize certain business rules and correct errors detected by the algorithm.
The synchronization is then automatic in your internal systems such as your ERP or your tariff management solution. Pricing discounts are calculated automatically.
For pricing teams, Unifai is :
For B2B traders, the Unifai solution allows to :
Stay tuned, a detailed example of how to update your rates via our platform is coming soon! Contact us to stop wasting time and money by simply updating your rates with Unifai.
Use AI to collect, classify, enrich, cleanse and standardize your product data from your suppliers or vendors.
