Lionbridge verifies Flintfox claims of super-fast speeds for nPrice pricing engine

Flintfox International has gained credibility for claims of super-fast speeds for its nPrice pricing engine after the software was verified by a testing firm used in the Microsoft Partner programme.

NPrice allows real-time pricing between businesses such as multiple manufacturers and retailers, which can run to hundreds of thousands of items and includes not just the price but also variables like sales commissions, special deals and bulk order discounts. Existing customers of Flintfox software include Abbott Laboratories and Quaker Oats of the US, Columbian Chemicals and Snack Brands Australia.

The pricing engine achieved response times of 0.058 milliseconds in tests by Nasdaq-listed Lionbridge Technologies, Flintfox says. NPrice was "a truly disruptive innovation" in a market where sometimes-elderly ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems struggled to crunch live prices within the rules of modern businesses, it said.

Steve MacLean, chief financial officer at Auckland-based Tasti Products said switching to Flintfox revenue management software on a Microsoft ERP system from a 25-year-old ERP system ended a long-term headache for the high-volume food manufacturer.

"Under the old system, the monthly processing of remittance advices was a nightmare," MacLean said. "Staff were presented with documents almost an inch thick and it would take days to process." He made the comments in a video posted on the Flintfox website.

Flintfox chief technology officer James Lett said the Lionbridge verification would be used in online marketing, branding and leaflets.

"People looking for trade promotion software – a big piece of it is pricing," he said. "We have this new pricing engine, nPrice, that can process those pricing rules against huge amounts of data – sometimes millions of customers and prices."

With prices "being an hour old is a problem, let alone a day out of date – high-tech prices change sometimes many times a day" and yet many companies were relying on systems that couldn't keep up.

Lett said Flintfox had turned to Lionbridge to counter skeptics who saw nPrice as being "too fast to be credible" and thought "you must be cheating."

The New Zealand-based company was founded in 1987 but it has a higher profile in overseas markets such as North America. It made the TIN100+ list in the high tech business sector as one of 10 hot emerging companies last year.

NPrice was developed with the help of a $158,000 Callaghan Innovation research and development project grant in 2013.

(BusinessDesk)

BusinessDesk receives funding to help cover the commercialisation of innovation from Callaghan Innovation.