Pricing Leadership

Welcome to PROS’ Pricing Leadership blog focused on delivering B2B pricing information for industry leaders. This blog features several of PROS’ employees, customers, and partners who share their perspectives and invite discussion on the issues they and other people are facing today in their pricing initiatives.

Guest Bloggers

Sanjay Seth | See my posts
Mr. Seth is a partner with Carlisle & Company, an Aftersales management consulting firm. He has over 16 years of automotive and consulting experience in North America and Europe. His background includes a broad array of strategic and process initiatives related to motor vehicle parts and service industry, with particular focus on revenue growth. These include identifying and implementing revenue and margin enhancement strategies, pricing management, market sizing and share assessment, service marketing & retention and supply chain management. As a practitioner he also often provides subject matter expertise and executive leadership to program implementation teams. Prior to joining Carlisle, Mr. Seth was a corporate strategy and operations consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. His background also includes engineering experience at Ford Motor Company.

Mr. Seth holds an MBA in Strategy & Finance from Ross School of Business (Michigan), MS in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State University and BS in Mechanical Engineering from Punjab Engineering College, India.

Robert Rutledge | See my posts
Rob is the Managing Partner of Accenture’s Pricing and Profit Optimisation practice in Asia Pacific and leads Accenture’s Strategy practice in Australia and New Zealand.  Rob has over 15 years of consulting experience, including strategic planning, benefit analysis, and business case development and architecture. He focuses on the communications and high tech sectors, but has experience across several additional industries including retail sales, oil and gas, financial services and utilities. He has delivered client work in APAC, North America, and Western Europe. Rob specializes in using his technology background and business experience to define, design, and develop achievable and creative business solutions to client challenges. Before joining Accenture Rob started and ran a computer and network system integration company based in Denver Colorado USA.  He drove 80%+ growth over several years before leaving his company to pursue his Masters Degree. Rob holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Management Information Systems and a Masters of Business Administration from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cecilia Bonfante | See my posts
Ms. Bonfante is a member of Accenture’s Pricing & Profit Optimization practice.  Her experiences have varied across Chemicals, Energy, and Professional Services clients.  Ms. Bonfante has been involved in several systems implementations which have successfully delivered analytics for marketing & sales, supply chain and finance functional areas.  Specifically, she has unique expertise in helping clients realize benefits associated with implementing their pricing strategies by designing and enabling pricing processes and technologies.  Her education includes a Bachelors degree in Chemistry from the University of Delaware.

Matt Johnson | See my posts
Matt has over 20 years experience in pricing and is currently a managing partner at Simon-Kucher & Partner where his current work focuses on helping companies develop effective marketing strategies and optimize their pricing processes to maximize revenue and profit growth. Matt is also a globally recognized expert in pricing optimization software and processes.  Matt has led pricing projects at over 100 companies in 22 countries across industries including: travel/transportation, cargo, energy, manufacturing, distribution, industrial, chemical, semiconductor, electronics, software and internet. In aggregate, these companies have recognized over a billion dollars in incremental revenue from their pricing projects. He holds degrees in history and computer science from Duke University and earned his MBA from Rice University.

PROS Bloggers

Martin Simoncic | See my posts
Mr. Simoncic is Director of Professional Services team at PROS and has led PROS implementations across multiple industries including petroleum, chemical, and manufacturing. Prior to joining PROS, Mr. Simoncic worked as a logistics engineer developing integrated pricing management and optimization systems in the transportation industry.  Mr. Simoncic received his Master of Business Administration degree with concentration in Logistics and Finance from the University of Arkansas. His Bachelor of Science degree was completed at the Louisiana Tech University with a major in Computer Information Systems.

Garth Hoff | See my posts
Mr. Hoff is the department head of PROS’ global corporate marketing team. His primary role includes management of PROS’ lead generation and marketing communications strategy and execution in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.  In the last two years PROS has been honored by the American Marketing Association as a 7 time finalist and 2 time winner at the AMA Houston Crystal Awards.  As a member of the PROS global sales organization, Mr. Hoff also provides leadership for business development in international markets with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. Mr. Hoff received his BS in International Business from Trinity University and MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Phil Gorman | See my posts
Mr. Gorman is a member of the Pricing Professional Services team at PROS. His primary roles include assessing customers pricing solution needs and configuring the PROS PPSS application to meet those requirements as well as offering guidance on data and interface development. As part of the PROS Pricing Professional Services Center of Excellence, Mr. Gorman helps PROS implementation teams develop innovative solutions that deliver exceptional value to PROS’ customers. Mr. Gorman received his BA in Chemistry and Economics from Rice University.

John Salch, Ph. D | See my posts
Dr. Salch is currently a Director of Product Development at PROS.  He leads groups responsible for PROS SOA strategy as well as extending PROS functionality onto several platforms including Microsoft Office, SharePoint and mobile devices such as the Blackberry.  Dr. Salch’s 12 year tenure at PROS includes time in the Science team developing forecasting algorithms as well as several development positions in a wide variety of PROS products.  He has been a proponent in the use of Agile/Lean development approaches at PROS and participates in several organizations in the technology community. Dr. Salch holds a Ph. D in Statistics from Rice University.

Maarten Oosten, Ph. D | See my posts
Dr. Oosten is currently Senior Director of Science & Research at PROS and responsible for Science Innovation. He joined PROS in the summer of 1999 after holding teaching and research positions at various schools, including the University of British Columbia, the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (business school of Carnegie Mellon University), and Maastricht University in The Netherlands. Since joining PROS, he has contributed to the successful deployment of several large scale revenue management and pricing optimization applications. Currently, Dr. Oosten manages the science and research group. He received his M.Sc. in Econometrics in 1988 from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Maastricht (The Netherlands) in 1996.  

Michael Davis | See my posts
Mr. Davis currently leads the professional services team in Europe, which is responsible for all pricing implementations across the continent in three major industries – Manufacturing, Distribution, and Services. He is responsible for all European customer relationships and focuses on decreasing his customers’ Time-to-Value on their pricing initiative.  Prior to joining PROS, he spent many years in the manufacturing and services industries as an Application Project Manager. During his time there, he was in charge of global applications, focusing on the development and deployment of multiple home grown and third-paty systems and applications including ERPs, CRMs, SCMs, and a contract analysis and management tool. Mr. Davis received his MBA in International Management from the University of Texas at Dallas and his BBA in Management Information Systems from Baylor University.

Neil Biehn, Ph. D | See my posts
Dr. Biehn is a Senior Scientist at PROS and has led Science & Research teams on multiple projects and pricing system implementations. In addition to other duties, Dr. Biehn heads the Market Segmentation Science Team at PROS. Prior to PROS, Dr. Biehn received his Ph.D. from North Carolina State University where he published numerous papers in automatic and optimal control. Dr. Biehn currently lives in Houston, TX where he was the local Chapter President of INFORMS during 2002-2005. Dr. Biehn continues to be an active member of the national chapter of INFORMS and presents at their annual conference regularly.

Doug Fuehne | See my posts
Mr. Fuehne is the Sr. Director of Science Solutions at PROS. Previous to PROS, he consulted for the oil & gas, chemical, discrete manufacturing, financial services, and retail industry clients; focusing on science and process based solutions for supply chain and M&A. Mr. Fuehne worked directly for manufacturing, energy trading, and financial services companies, performing operations and running e-commerce groups. He earned his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois and MBA in Quantitative Operations from Vanderbilt University.