Project led by Bruno Jiménez, now an Akaen partner.
A global technology products manufacturer managed 150 resellers across five European countries. It needed visibility into who sold what, at which price and when agreed ranges were breached. Monthly manual checks produced data 30 days late, after margins had already been eroded.
Executive summary
About the customer
A global technology products leader with a large, varied European distribution network. Its priority was to protect margins and keep pricing consistent without slowing channel growth.
The Challenge: The Blindness of Success
With 1,000 SKUs (stock keeping units, or unique product references) across 150 websites, visibility became a bottleneck. Each month, analysts manually checked stores, copied prices into Excel and detected deviations too late. This led to slow responses and a downward pricing domino effect.
The Solution: Dynamic Weekly Auditing
We designed a system based on Retail Intelligence that audits the whole catalogue every week. Instead of using static lists, the engine discovers active products at each reseller and learns each website’s behaviour to keep monitoring up to date.
Automated Processes (3 key flows)
1. Catalogue discovery
The Problem: Changing listings and new references that were lost between audits.
Transformation: Automatic detection of active products by reseller, not dependent on static lists.
2. Price and stock monitoring
The Problem: lack of weekly visibility on prices, promotions and availability.
Transformation: continuous capture of prices, stock and promotions to build comparable historical data series.
3. Outlier detection and alerts
The Problem: price deviations identified when they had already eroded margins.
Transformation: Automatic alerts when a reseller falls outside the contractual range or market price.
Operational comparison
- • Monthly manual audit.
- • Partial sampling of the catalogue.
- • Data 30 days late.
- • Substantial manual work in Excel.
- • Weekly automatic audit.
- • 100% of the catalogue monitored.
- • Alerts in less than 7 days.
- • Human focus on strategic management.
The Impact
The company regained control and response speed. Weekly deviation detection reduced the domino effect of discounts and stabilised margins without sacrificing channel growth.
- 400 hours freed up per month: the team went from collecting data to managing the channel.
- Total visibility: 1,000 SKUs monitored continuously.
- Reaction time: deviations detected in less than a week.
Operational results
- Reinforced price SLAs: proactive control throughout the European network.
- Governance of the channel: Priority alerts to negotiate with key resellers.
- Immediate scaling: new divisions or countries added without expanding the team.
Conclusion
“From a monthly manual report to a clear weekly monitoring system that detects deviations in real time.”
Want to regain control of pricing across your sales channel? .