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Case study · Technical Safety Services

Pricebook automation program

Rescued a failed company-wide pricing rollout by encoding executive pricing rules as a 48-module Python program that generates the price books CPQ and CRM depend on.

Period
2024 – present
Role
Designer · sole developer
Results

$15.7M

revenue priced in year one

48

modules · 6,000+ lines

0

pricing errors after cutover

Figures are those published in my resume. Architecture is described at the pattern level: no confidential configuration, pricing logic, or customer data appears on this site.

Executives had defined a new pricing strategy, but the rollout failed. The rules existed on paper; applying them consistently across every service, customer segment, and division in the price books that CPQ and Salesforce consume was manual, slow, and error-prone.

Pricing errors reached customers, and fixing them meant paying contractors to rework price books by hand each time a rule changed. The business needed pricing that was correct by construction and could change as fast as the executives changed their minds.

  1. Treated pricing rules as code. Sat with the executives who owned the strategy, translated each rule into an explicit, testable definition, and kept those definitions in one place so a rule change is a code change with a history.

  2. Designed a modular architecture, 48 modules in total: data ingestion from the source systems, rule definitions, the pricing engine that composes them, validation against expected outcomes, output generation in the formats CPQ and CRM load, and an audit trail of what was priced and why.

  3. Built validation into the pipeline so no price book publishes until every rule passes and the results reconcile against the previous version. Differences are surfaced for review rather than silently shipped.

  4. Calibrated the rules on evidence rather than opinion: outlier screening on the sales history that feeds the engine, and a price-elasticity study on the order-line panel so the executives could see how much volume a given increase was likely to cost before approving it.

  5. Wrote the program to be run and maintained by one person, with documentation, tests, and structured outputs, so it does not depend on a contractor engagement to stay current.

From an executive pricing rule to a published price book
  1. Ingest Sales history and service data from the warehouse and source systems.
  2. Screen Outlier screening and filtering on the history the engine learns from.
  3. Classify Facilities and price-book changes sorted into the classes the rules address.
  4. Price Reference and realized prices, adjustments, aggregation: the rules as code.
  5. Validate & reconcile Every rule passes and the book reconciles against the last version, or nothing publishes. gate
  6. Export The formats CPQ and the CRM load.
  7. Audit What was priced, by which rule, and why.

Stage names describe the program at the pattern level. The rules themselves are confidential.

$15.7M of revenue was priced through the program in its first year.

Pricing errors were eliminated after cutover, and contractor spend on price-book maintenance was reduced because rule changes no longer require manual rework.

Executive pricing decisions now have a direct path into the systems reps quote from, which closes the loop between strategy and execution.

Where it sits

The highlighted nodes are the systems and people this project touched.

works opportunities submits field leads creates opportunities change requests scope · validation two-way sync price books pricing rules closed-won data CRM + quote data history forecast + intervals models analytics Sales team national org · 3 divisions Field technicians on-site at customer facilities IT & external consultants change control I govern Salesforce CRM system of record Tech Opportunity Program field leads into the pipeline Pricebook automation Python · 48 modules DealHub CPQ quoting backbone Commissions automation closed-won to payout Snowflake · MS SQL Server analytics data layer Revenue forecasting ensemble · ETS · LightGBM · foundation models Power BI executive dashboards CEO · CFO · VP Sales Ops decisions in, rules out