RAMP ("Retail Analysis and Management of Pricing") is a product, targeted at the oil industry, which assists with many of the business processes involved in the pricing of retail petroleum products. The intellectual property rights (IPR) for the RAMP product, including all associated modules, are wholly owned by IIS Ltd.

Over the last decade, pricing in the retail fuels marketing industry has become increasingly difficult with the introduction of new retailers and a reduction in the entry cost into the business. Throughout the world, a trend of hypermarket organisations adding petroleum sales as an additional offering to grocery sales at low prices has caused pressure on the pump prices and has increasingly segmented the market. In many countries this has led to a dynamic market with the traditional market leaders losing market share, giving rise to a need to bring rigour and responsiveness to pricing decisions. RAMP has been designed to meet these needs and builds upon proven industry experience with the internationally recognised Pricewatch scheme in the United Kingdom.

RAMP allows the business to define markets and associated pricing rules for these markets. It then provides mechanisms to collect competitor prices in these markets, and systematically applies the pricing rules to suggest new prices for pricing analysts to review. A pricing analyst is provided with an array of relevant information about the market to assist in the evaluation of a pricing decision.

The primary business goal of RAMP is to allow a small number of pricing analysts to monitor and react to price changes, covering many hundreds if not thousands of their own sites, on an as-needed basis depending on the dynamics of the market. These might range from a number of times a day through to weekly. The key is that the analyst can react to market conditions in a time-efficient manner.

In business process terms the following diagram represents the various elements of the pricing processes showing the Pricing Strategy at the heart of the process.

Over the last decade, RAMP has been implemented by multiple multi-national oil customers, and manages prices for around 40,000 service stations, handling the intricacies of pricing in 50+ countries across the globe. It has evolved through numerous versions and geographies, and comprises hundreds of man-years of development effort. The end result is that RAMP has become a very mature product set and it would be difficult to imagine any kind of pricing market or environment that has not already been encountered!

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