Wilbur-Ellis Unlocks New Capabilities by Expanding to PROS Gen IV AI

“PROS Gen IV AI provides more strategic pricing recommendations that align with the market and our strategy.”

Frank Moore Division Pricing Manager

The Customer

Founded in 1921, Wilbur-Ellis is a global services leader in precision agriculture technology and products, as well as animal feed and specialty chemicals industries within agribusiness. Headquartered in San Francisco, the company has 4,400 employees committed to developing strong relationships and capitalizing on new opportunities. Innovation is at the heart of what they do every day, looking at new ways and better approaches to provide food for the world to thrive. And when it comes to navigating the challenges of pricing and selling to a wide and diverse customer base, Wilbur-Ellis relies on PROS. 

The Challenge

Prior to using PROS in its Ag Retail business unit, pricing was done manually in spreadsheets that were static. It would take 48 hours for the local pricing teams to update prices, yet they were covering less than half their portfolio. That meant that the pricing for most of their products was potentially outdated. The process was time-consuming, and it was difficult to keep up with all the complexities of an ever-changing market. It became clear that pricing manually in this environment was inviting errors in pricing, bottlenecks in the sales process, and margin leakage that needed to be reversed.

Like a lot of long-established companies, Wilbur-Ellis recognized that to capture the full value of their products, they needed to evolve their pricing process with modern technology that could help them develop impactful pricing strategies with speed and efficiency.

Hello PROS

In 2020, Wilbur-Ellis implemented PROS Smart Price Optimization and Management solution to replace the headaches of pricing spreadsheets with AI-based price optimization, which delivers optimal prices for every unique selling scenario. With PROS, Wilbur-Ellis now has instant access to pricing that is market-driven, rather than based on a cost-plus model.

This is a huge step forward and provides big benefits:

• Real-time pricing—Pricing that previously took 48 hours, and still only covered 50% of their products, is now executed in real time and on demand for their entire product portfolio. They now have real-time pricing guidance for over 6,000 SKUs.
• Increased productivity—The move to a centralized pricing team using modern technology means that their pricing team can be more strategic rather than spending all day updating and managing pricing spreadsheets. This also alleviates sales managers, enabling them to easily tap into real-time pricing instead of relying on spreadsheets that may be out of date.
• Fast ROI—With the realization of margin uplift plus the reduced time to quote, the investment paid for itself in less than a year. Wilbur-Ellis saw gains of over 2% margin increase over the business average in areas where they were using price optimization from PROS. This is in a market notorious for razor-thin margins and in a turbulent year (2021).
• Simplified pricing—They were also able to align pricing strategies across their company, solve the issue of complex customer pricing, and increase pricing visibility to the sales team and sales leadership.

After taking the first major step in their pricing journey and seeing the positive impact, Wilbur-Ellis was ready to continue their successful partnership with PROS, incorporating the latest PROS innovations.

The Neural Network Pricing Advantage 

While attending PROS Outperform in 2023, Wilbur-Ellis learned about PROS Gen IV AI, a new approach to price optimization that uses neural networks rather than traditional micro-segmentation to predict pricing.

“The partnership with PROS has really helped us unlock the data potential with our pricing,” says Frank Moore, Pricing Manager for Wilbur-Ellis. “So, we were really interested when we heard about PROS Gen IV AI and all the exciting possibilities of neural network-based science,” he said.

After seeing positive reactions to their model in a test environment, Wilbur-Ellis went live with Gen IV AI in late 2023.

“The move to Gen IV wasn’t a large investment and it was delivered under budget and ahead of schedule,” says Frank. “We were fully launched in six weeks, instead of the planned eight weeks.”

PROS Gen IV AI enables Wilbur-Ellis to:

• Overcome pricing gaps—One of the main features of Gen IV AI neural network pricing is that there is no segmentation needed. This is revolutionary because it overcomes the limitations of traditional pricing segmentation that created gaps in Wilbur-Ellis’ pricing process due to nuances in their data. Now, they can identify similarities and patterns across all transactions with a more fluid approach and get a specific price for any combination of product, customer, attributes, and market conditions—even when some information is missing, or the combination has never been seen before. 
• Leverage 100% of attributes—Neural network pricing also enables Wilbur-Ellis to utilize all their attributes. They went from using 6 attributes originally to 15 attributes today. By using 100% of their dataset, they’re able to find all correlations in willingness to pay at the customer-product level for greater price prediction accuracy. Rather than relying on a broad, segmented customer size, they’re able to use a multitude of attributes to more accurately predict customer willingness to pay and truly measure peers on a continuum basis.  
• Understand what’s driving a price recommendation—The pricing team can see in greater detail the individual influences of all 15 attributes due to how granular the data is from the neural networks. This helps with price adoption from the sales team. For example, in their dashboard, pricers can monitor the health of a price model, understand uplift analysis on each scenario being run, point out top areas of opportunity, truly understand how the attributes are making an impact on the pricing recommendations, and see in real time how the model is adjusting over time to changing market and selling conditions.
• Use elasticity to better predict pricing—Now they can detect cost fluctuations and market swings and provide more accurate pricing based on an elasticity curve to understand the relationship between win probability and price. This win probability continuously learns and adjusts, helping them understand whether they need to increase or decrease a price to adjust for what they’re seeing in terms of win rates, as well as respond to current trends in the most effective way. 
• Create game-changing strategies—The pricing team can stack various models on top of each other for deeper analysis. This can be a game changer when looking at overall pricing strategies and understanding where they can gain traction on market share.

An Empowering Partnership

“We really value the strategic partnership with PROS,” says Frank. “The PROS team was there for us throughout the entire process, helping to train our team and explain the model set up components,” said Frank.

The support from PROS also includes workshops, thought leadership, and online self-serve training that Wilbur-Ellis can tap into when they need it. For example, when they recently hired a new pricing analyst, she took the PROS University online course to get up to speed quickly on how to use the PROS Smart Price Optimization and Management solution. “This saves us about 30 hours of training,” says Frank. “A new pricing analyst can spend 10 hours taking the PROS online course, rather than shadowing me for a week.”

Realizing Transformative Results 

With the move to PROS Smart Price Optimization and Management with Gen IV AI, Wilbur-Ellis has unlocked new capabilities to further refine and improve their pricing accuracy with more robust science.

“The solution provides us with so many details around each attribute and many ways to dig into the data,” said Frank. “In the neural network, the price prediction is significantly better enabling us to stay ahead of inflation,” he added. “PROS Gen IV AI provides more strategic pricing recommendations that align with the market and our strategy,” he added.