Proactive pricing policies

Guaranteeing the lowest price for every product at any time

Colruyt is a leading retailer in Europe with online shops and over 1,000 physical outlets across Belgium, Luxembourg and France. It has ten business formats and diversified business lines.

Colruyt’s business success has been built on keeping costs down and investing resources in guaranteeing the lowest price for every product at any time. But this is no easy feat. Staying on top means monitoring competitors’ online and in-store prices and promotions, and responding to changes with updated prices for those items, as well as for hierarchically linked items, across all stores and business formats.

Over time, Colruyt’s pricing processes were finding it difficult to cope with the sheer volumes and complexity. Colruyt started the successful collaboration with TCS as the strategic partner to harness the power of automation and other digital technologies to transform its pricing platform.

Next-Gen Pricing Engine

An algorithmic, near real-time, intelligent system to automate pricing strategy

Colruyt and TCS collaborated successfully to implement the Next-Gen Pricing Engine, an algorithmic, near real-time, intelligent system that automates the deployment of the pricing strategy across products, linked items, stores, channels and brands. To improve the instore price recording from competitor locations, a real time mobile app was launched to boost the productivity and accuracy. The system uses in-parallel memory processing for large volumes of data to generate price recommendations at near real time speed.

Very importantly, the engine caters to the varied pricing strategies relevant to Colruyt’s different business lines – regular everyday low prices, high-low, promotions and markdown, enabling the competitive benefits to accrue across the enterprise.

Brand promise delivered

TCS helps Colruyt process up to 50 million reaction prices per day

Partnering with TCS for the innovative use of technology is helping Colruyt respond to competitors 24 x 7 with speed and agility, capturing over 100,000 competitor prices, and processing up to 50 million reaction prices per day. This has helped the retailer strengthen its competitive differentiation, live up to its brand promise and drive growth.

A mission-critical platform

Helping businesses respond quickly to changes in the market

About the partnership, Peter Vanbellingen CIO, Colruyt IT says, “At Colruyt, we continuously focus on technology innovation to help our businesses respond quickly to changes in the market, and to grow. The Next-Gen Pricing Engine is one such innovative, mission-critical platform that we have built in partnership with TCS. Their deep retail industry knowledge, digital expertise and collaborative ways of working helped us accomplish our vision to harness the power of AI, automation and digital technologies to help elevate our brand and strengthen our competitive edge.”