Application for Price Control Approval Process

Background: Currently, there are a number of goods/products which have their retail prices fixed based on a formula which utilized the item’s wholesale purchase price, shipping and other charges to determine the final allocation of costs to be apportioned to the product. This is done using a “Price Sheet”. Once that price is determined, the “recommended retail price” and “recommended wholesale price” is determined and provided to the retail outlets, who are required to adhere to the established prices for the current batch of goods. This process is done for each batch of goods received (shipment) and is thus associated with a batch number and shipment date for each “importer”. 1. Price Approval Application, Process Flow and Database What we are seeking to undertake is to digitize the price determination process by applying a series of formulas against the input numbers (purchase price, shipping costs, handling costs, brokerage costs, other costs, cost allocation percentage) to automatically determine the “recommended retail/wholesale prices”. There are also document submissions (invoices, shipping documents & records, etc) which can be used to verify the figures being used. There will be a number of approval stages: validate input documents & data, validate calculations, approve determined prices. Those stages will require human intervention - maybe an approval checkbox to allow the process to move to the next stage, or a rejection which would push it back to the previous or alternate “exception” stage to require some corrective procedures (update of documents, etc..). The final document is the approved price sheet, of which a number of copies are output - 1 copy for physical filing, 1 copy for transmittal to the retail outlet or applicant (this can be done in electronic format, maybe even pushed to an applicant portal where they can have access to all of their documents, messages, status and feedback on any application, and any other likely B2B functionality). Wishlist: allow for electronic submission of the input documents. allow for electronic output of final approval documents (applicant portal) History of record of complaints. investigations and results. for products under price control (see later section). 2. Mobile App After the products are made available for sale, there are product monitors who go out to the retail establishments to verify the goods are actually being sold at the established prices. This may be done as a spot check, or in response to a complaint. This process will require identifying of the product at the retail establishment, and checking the relevant price sheet to match the retail price with the recommended price based on the appropriate price sheet. The field officers are then required to have copies of the price sheets in their possession to be able to perform the required verification. It is intended that the field officers will be provided with tablets for this task. The tablets will have an application which has a copy of the database of approved price sheets. which can be queried by vendor, item, batch, date or various criteria to be able to determine the specific item and associated price. Further details can be provided as required. Our preference would be for modification of an existing (open source) software product such as CRM/ERP, Workflow management or help desk system as opposed to development from the ground up, which will allow for further independent extension/growth of the system.