Liebich: What you should do from the project management side in a project group is to understand first how products are priced at a customer. What are the components? What are the different prices you have, what allowances, which charges, which rebates, etc.? What are these prices built on? You should spend most of your time understanding these requirements. Based on these requirements, build your price and design.

What you should not do is start configuring one requirement after another. You will not have much success. It gets convoluted, and you would have to redo a lot of work. It's really important to get all the business requirements first and then apply this in one design.

Reed: For a project team that's trying to best understand pricing, is this book something you think can make a difference there as well?

Liebich: Yes, I think so. The Ultimate SAP Pricing Guide is structured in chapters that build on each other, so you can flip through and try to see how condition records are created, but it won't do any good if you don't understand how the configuration works and what the components of the pricing system are. The book will provide you with a good understanding of why things happen a certain way in the system and how you can change it to meet your business requirements.

Reed: A lot of my readers and listeners are very interested in what it takes to succeed as an independent consultant. I'd like talk a couple of minutes about your own career because you've done that for a long time now. One thing that struck me is that you have a broad range of skills. You're not just a pricing person, but pricing has really been the core of how you've gotten hired on projects. What are some of the keys to your success in this field for so long?

Liebich: One is to always add to your knowledge. For example, you start with pricing, but you can't see pricing as a sole component because pricing is part of the Order to Cash process. So you have to have an understanding of how an order is created, what drives pricing based on the order, what can change between the order and the invoice side, if you're going to reprice and waste time, if you keep the prices the same as sales orders. What are you going to do on credits? Are you crediting for all the pricing components you had on the original invoice, are you only doing partial ones, etc.?

As I mentioned before, if you understand the condition technique you can apply this not only to pricing but to other components in the SAP system as well. So for example, on one project I reconfigured the whole packing functionality, which also is based on the condition technique principle. This got me a spot on a team that implemented the first truck optimization functionality at sales order time, basically seeing a real time truck displayed based on the items that were entered on that order.

Build on the skills you have, and if you have a thorough understanding of the condition technique you can apply it to other components as well.

Reed: That makes a lot of sense. And then of course don't be afraid of ABAP.

Liebich: Right.

Reed: Good advice for the pricing master. I imagine, too, on the ABAP side there are probably opportunities to move into more functional directions through scenarios like pricing.

Liebich: That's correct.

Reed: I want to let our listeners know that Matthias and I have been collaborating on this book now for two years; it's been a shared passion for both of us to put this in print. I think when you read the book, you're really going to get a sense of why it is really an achievement on his part, and the sacrifices he put into it.

Do you have any closing words of advice for anyone who might be thinking about writing a book? A lot of us talk about writing books, but not very many people finish.

Liebich: It was a long process, but I'm glad I went through it. You have to stick to it. You have to have a concept. Don't get discouraged if you get stuck somewhere. What I can only advise is to go through it in a logical manner: explain it as if you were trying to understand it yourself. Again, I wrote this book because I wished I had that book earlier in my career to understand the step-by-step instructions to get to a good result.

Reed: I think it's a good result indeed. For those listeners who are interested in learning more, we're going to post some of the book samples on JonERP.com. And of course on Amazon we've already seen a number of viewers chime in with their thoughts, so you can check out the list in there and read some of the reviews for yourself and get a feeling for what people in the field are saying about the book.

With that, Matthias, I'd like to thank you for your time and for sharing your insights on pricing with our listeners. This is Jon Reed of JonERP.com signing off in Atlanta.