Bormioli Pharma item categorization for product analysis and price management

Abstract

My master thesis describes the project of product portfolio reorganization carried out for Bormioli Pharma, an Italian B2B company producing glass and plastic primary packaging for pharmaceutical manufacturers. The firm sells every year more than 5 billion pieces, thoroughly organized into clusters inside a company database. The choice of creating new product categories has come from the need of improving the selling volumes analysis, yearly conducted to identify the overall market trends, and supporting the implementation of a new pricing strategy. The firm has, in fact, started to adopt a new price management system, specifically developed to introduce a unique approach of price definition and execution. In the course of this paper, after a presentation of the pharmaceutical packaging market and an overview of the firm, we provide an explanation of the most common B2B pricing models on the market, in relation to the new Bormioli Pharma price management approach. Secondly, we describe the entire process of product recategorization, starting from a preliminary analysis of the main problematics related to the current Bormioli Pharma product categories, going through the definition of a new methodology for changing the product portfolio organizational structure and reaching up to the concrete integration of the new categories inside the company database. The final part of the work is an experimental study made on a sample of new and old categories to verify their efficacy.