Wonder Maryline: Her Superpower Is Billing at the Right Price.
Introduction
Pricing complexity is not just an operational irritant; it is a revealing indicator of the maturity of a company’s business model, the robustness of its information system, and its ability to steer performance.
In many companies, there is one person who stands apart. The one everyone turns to as soon as a pricing question becomes too complicated. The one who can find the right discount, the right exception, the right historical logic, where everyone else sees only a haze of rules, Excel files, and special cases.
Let’s call her Wonder Maryline.
Her superpower is not flying or walking through walls. Her superpower is enabling the organization to bill at the right price. That famous price which, on the one hand, preserves the company’s economic profitability while, on the other hand, respecting the conditions negotiated with the customer or customers.
And she deserves real credit: as long as she is there, everything works. Prices are correct, invoices go out, disputes are handled, sales teams feel reassured, and customer service, thanks to a know-how that is often invisible, keeps the whole structure standing. She deserves even more credit in a sector traditionally affected by high employee turnover, where the loss of historical knowledge is almost inevitable.
So the problem is not Wonder Maryline. The problem is everything her existence reveals.
This is something I observe very regularly when I meet customers or prospects in food companies. Whenever I raise the topic of pricing models, the same conclusion often comes back: even after an hour of discussion, it is difficult to provide a clear, structured, and comprehensive explanation. Not because of a lack of competence, but because the system has become more complex through successive layers. People open Excel files, compare versions, verify whether they are still valid, recalculate formulas, correct discrepancies…
In other words, human expertise is compensating for what the model can no longer explain simply.
Because if only one person is capable of guaranteeing the right price, that means the system itself is not.
Key message: when a pricing model relies on the memory of a single person, it is not expertise that secures the business; it is the fragility of the system that is being revealed.
How Pricing Complexity Takes Hold
No one deliberately designs an unmanageable pricing model. In most cases, complexity does not stem from a single decision but from the gradual accumulation of legitimate adjustments made to respond to commercial, competitive, or operational challenges.
At first, it is simply about adapting: responding to a strategic customer, winning a tender, protecting margin in a competitive context. One discount is granted, then another. One exception is introduced, then kept. Each decision makes sense… in isolation.
But over time, those decisions accumulate.
Exceptions become the norm, rules multiply, and the original model disappears. In its place, a layering of different logics coexists as best it can.
And that is when Wonder Maryline becomes indispensable. Because when the model is no longer readable, someone has to keep its living memory.
Four Warning Signs of a Pricing Model in Decline
These warning signs do not always appear at the same time, nor with the same intensity. But when they take hold, they reveal the same underlying reality: the pricing model no longer functions as a clear framework for steering the business, but as a system that must be constantly interpreted, corrected, and maintained.
First Warning Sign: Dependency on Pricing Setup and Maintenance
The first warning sign is operational dependency. Prices exist and are calculated, but they are no longer truly understood. Internal teams hesitate to explain them, customers question them, and discussions multiply whenever a rule, an exception, or a calculation must be justified.
This loss of readability creates growing dependency on the people who can still interpret the model as a whole. Wonder Maryline becomes the official interpreter of a system that no one truly masters end to end anymore. She knows how to retrieve the right logic, the right exception, the right sequence of rules. But a pricing model that requires a translator is no longer a model that is genuinely under control.
This dependency is visible very concretely in the setup and maintenance of pricing. Every new negotiation becomes longer to translate, trickier to configure, and less certain to test. The model still works, but at the cost of an ever-increasing effort simply to keep it running.
Key takeaway: when a pricing model requires more energy to maintain than to steer, it has already entered a logic of degradation.
Second Warning Sign: Billing Errors and the Number of Financial Credit Notes
The second warning sign is execution fragility. When the pricing model becomes too complex, billing errors increase, and with them the number of financial credit notes, corrections, and adjustments.
As discounts, exceptions, and special conditions pile up, the economic reading of the model becomes blurred. The company may still be able to produce a correct invoice in many cases, but it can no longer always explain precisely the mechanisms that guarantee its reliability. The more numerous and implicit the rules become, the greater the risk of error when pricing is applied, checked, or changed.
In this context, Wonder Maryline knows how to “keep the machine running.” She knows how to apply the right rules, avoid certain discrepancies, and recover complex situations. But this execution capability masks a deeper reality: the company is no longer truly steering its pricing; it is compensating for its weaknesses through human checks and constant arbitration.
Key takeaway: a high volume of financial credit notes is not just a billing quality issue; it is often a symptom of a pricing model that has become too difficult to apply reliably and repeatedly.
When Pricing Complexity Becomes a Constraint on the Information System
Another immediate effect comes with this complexity: the information system itself.
A simple model can be configured. A model that has become unreadable gets worked around. At that point, the ERP stops being a lever for standardization and becomes the receptacle for business incoherence: multiplying rules, proliferating exceptions, increasing reliance on custom developments, and making it ever harder to maintain a coherent framework over time.
In an implementation project, exceptions are often discovered during the testing phase, potentially generating additional costs and contract amendment negotiations.
In a migration project, up to 40% of the budget may be spent on adaptations needed to handle undocumented pricing exceptions.
Third Warning Sign: Inability to Benchmark Customers
The third warning sign is the loss of comparability. When pricing rules become too heterogeneous, it becomes very difficult to compare customers reliably.
Two customers with apparently similar discount levels may in reality be treated according to completely different logics, with exceptions, historical arrangements, or implicit criteria that distort any overall reading. The data exists, but it is no longer truly comparable. And without comparability, there can be no meaningful customer benchmarking, no solid commercial arbitration, and no real ability to steer the consistency of the pricing model.
Key takeaway: a pricing model that no longer allows objective comparison of customer situations deprives the company of one of its essential levers for commercial steering.
Fourth Warning Sign: Confusing Economic Value with Operational Constraints
The fourth warning sign is more structural: price eventually starts depending on parameters that no longer reflect the true economic value of the offer.
This is one of the most dangerous drifts, because it gives the pricing model an appearance of coherence while gradually disconnecting it from its economic logic. Take a classic example: a discount based on the number of packages.
On paper, it looks simple. In reality, it introduces a major inconsistency. The value of an item does not depend on how it is packed. A product may be highly profitable while taking up little space; conversely, a bulky product may have low value. When price is tied to a logistical constraint, pricing becomes disconnected from value.
Because the value of an item does not depend on its packaging configuration.
Key takeaway: good pricing should reflect a logic of value, not absorb logistical, historical, or organizational constraints that should be handled elsewhere.
A product may be highly profitable while taking up little space. Conversely, a bulky product may have low value. By linking price to a logistical constraint, pricing becomes disconnected from value.
The Real Trade-Off: Risk of Change Versus Cost of Inaction
Simplifying is often perceived as risky.
Renegotiating, clarifying, resetting… all of that seems dangerous. So companies prefer to maintain the complexity.
But this complexity has a cost.
And that cost is rarely measured.
The challenge, then, is to compare two risks:
- the risk of change
- the risk of inaction
By simplifying, the company gains efficiency, readability, and control. And part of that value can be redistributed in the form of a discount that is simpler, clearer, and sometimes even more advantageous.
The discussion then changes in nature: invisible complexity is replaced with deliberate simplicity.
Where to Start if You Want to Regain Control
In most cases, it is neither realistic nor desirable to redesign everything in one go. A more effective approach is to first make the existing complexity explicit, then prioritize the areas where it creates the most risk, cost, or inertia.
- Map the rules that are actually applied: distinguish structuring principles from historical exceptions.
- Identify human dependencies: pinpoint the topics only one or two people can still explain or arbitrate.
- Measure the cost of complexity: time spent, project overruns, disputes, rework, maintenance, and difficulty transferring knowledge.
- Reassess the economic logic: verify that pricing criteria truly reflect a logic of value rather than organizational constraints that have become permanent.
Treat simplification as a governance effort: involve business, finance, sales, and IT to make durable decisions.
Conclusion
Before launching any evolution or information system change, it is essential to revisit your pricing model.
Why? First, to ensure that you are able to explain your pricing degradation clearly to the consultant or integrator who will support you. Then, to take a critical look at the simplifications and optimizations that are possible in light of the warning signs discussed above. In practice, this is less a matter of technical cleanup than of strategic clarification: which rules truly create value, which ones are merely historical leftovers, and which ones now prevent the company from steering its performance with confidence?
A good pricing model is not the one that accumulates rules. It is the one that remains explainable, comparable, and steerable over time.
And if tomorrow Wonder Maryline goes on vacation, the company must still remain capable of billing at the right price—not thanks to individual memory, but thanks to a model that is genuinely under control.
