Session Notes: Janet — Pricing Updates

2026-06-03 · Janet, with Nate St. Pierre

Overview

This was the final session with Janet, focused on how pricing gets updated — both when vendors change their costs and when Merrick makes internal pricing decisions. The conversation covered the current manual process, a historical data sync problem Janet has been cleaning up, and the broader question of whether the right fix is better process documentation or a more automated technical system. It also connected back to the single-input concept from the earlier product entry conversation.

How Pricing Is Structured in Ordova

Each product in Ordova can have multiple variants — combinations of size and color — and each variant has its own cost, retail price, wholesale price, and vendor part number. For a product like a tumbler with a dozen color options, that means a dozen separate pricing rows, all of which need to be maintained. Managing this manually is impractical for any significant number of products; the Excel import function is the realistic path for bulk pricing work.

The Vendor Pricing Update Process

When a vendor changes their prices, the update has to flow through several steps before it's reflected anywhere customers can see it:

1. The vendor issues a new price sheet
2. The new costs get pulled into Merrick's internal pricing spreadsheet
3. The pricing spreadsheet gets entered or imported into Ordova
4. Ordova's data gets exported, reformatted, and imported into the first distributor catalog
5. The second distributor catalog gets updated separately

Every step is manual. The reformatting for the distributor catalogs is where Janet currently uses Claude to speed things up — but it's still her individual workflow, not a shared process.

The notification side is also unreliable. Some vendors do notify Merrick when prices change, but others may not. And even when notification comes in, there's no guaranteed process for catching it and acting on it promptly. The current reality: sometimes a price change gets caught when the buyer (Tara) sees a different cost when placing an order. Sometimes it gets caught when an order is sold at a price that's now below cost — and Merrick takes the loss on that order before making the adjustment.

Nate flagged two questions this surfaced that need to go to Maren: whether there's a cost variance threshold (for example, a 5% or 7% change) that triggers a mandatory pricing review, and whether customer or vendor relationships factor into pricing decisions (for example, holding a price for a key account even when costs go up).

The Historical Sync Problem

A significant part of the current data integrity issue in Ordova traces back to how pricing changes were handled in the past. When a price needed to change quickly — usually because a customer was waiting — Maren would update the distributor catalog directly, since that's what customers see. Ordova wouldn't get updated at the same time, with the intention of doing it later. Often, later didn't happen.

The result: Ordova and the distributor catalog ended up showing different prices. Ordova, which is supposed to be the internal source of truth, had stale pricing. Janet has been working to correct this — she started enforcing an Ordova-first discipline, updating Ordova first and then pushing outward, so that the internal system stays accurate before anything appears on the distributor website. This cleanup is ongoing.

Internal Pricing Changes

Vendor cost changes aren't the only trigger for pricing updates. Merrick also makes internal adjustments — raising or holding prices based on business decisions, and increasingly, correcting prices based on the labor rate data Janet has been developing. As the labor analysis produces more accurate cost-to-produce figures, products that were underpriced based on incomplete data are getting repriced. These internal changes follow the same pipeline as vendor-driven ones.

The SOP vs. Technology Question

Nate raised the question of whether the right fix is better process documentation or a more automated technical system. The full single-input architecture — where any change enters one system and pushes to all three in the correct formats — is a significant build, the kind of production-grade integration that lands in the larger-scoped-build range rather than a quick win. The alternative is a clear, enforced SOP that everyone follows.

Janet's honest assessment: an SOP technically exists, but it's not being followed. The breakdown isn't lack of documentation — it's that people enter pricing and product data from different environments under different circumstances, and the SOP doesn't hold up under those conditions. Sales entering a product during a customer call isn't going to stop and follow a multi-step process.

She also noted that all three people Nate had spoken with — Sandra, Maren, and herself — had described versions of the same problem independently, which she saw as significant. The multi-system sync issue is a shared organizational pain point, not just her personal frustration.

Nate noted that if the time currently spent on manual syncing, cleanup, and format transformation across all three people adds up to meaningful hours per week, the economics of a technical solution look different — a conversation worth having with Maren and Sandra.

Email Templates (Side Conversation)

Janet brought up the email template system that Maren had mentioned — a large library of templates in SharePoint for customer service responses. Nate explained the concept: feed an incoming email to an AI, it identifies the right template and drafts a reply, and the human reviews and sends. Janet understood it immediately. She confirmed this is real friction for the team.

Follow-Ups

• Ask Maren: Is there a pricing change threshold that triggers a mandatory review?
• Ask Maren: Do client or vendor relationships factor into holding or adjusting prices?
• Ask Maren: Who has pricing authority — can sales change prices in Ordova, and at what level does a price change require approval?
• Ask Janet: Do vendors provide consistent-format price sheets across the board?
• Confirm with Janet: How complete is the Ordova / distributor-catalog price cleanup — are there known remaining mismatches?