Ryan Vogelsberg

This year has seen a record number of supplier price increases pushed on Valin due to many supply chain constraints. At the same time, Valin lost a pricing analyst, which caused the team to be severely understaffed to manage the numerous price increases. During this time, Ryan Vogelsberg stepped up and took on many exception pricing files to ensure that Valin maintained its margins throughout the company and did not have any concessions in price. Ryan learned how to manage pricing files, which was a new world for him. As a result, he moved outside of his role to help Valin and all shareholders by maintaining critical margins throughout the company. Ryan gained additional developmental skills in working with Sales and Customer Service by providing pricing suggestions and working with those teams to ensure exception prices were communicated and passed along to customers. Ryan worked to understand the pricing process and suggested how it could be more efficient with a divide and conquer type approach.

Ryan utilized training videos to gain an understanding of the exception pricing process. He split his time between his normal functions of running sales reports, developing dashboards, maintaining rebate reports, and classifying customers, suppliers, and projects within P21. He took on some of the tougher exception price increases, specifically one of Valin’s largest instrumentation suppliers. He was able to dig into the information and get an understanding of all the discount structures, the general increases, and the many customers that are impacted by the supplier's price increase. This included restructuring a Refinery customer pricing from hardcoded prices to an off-list discount. This is important because it allows Valin to be more effective in passing along price increases. When a price list comes in, and costs are updated, customers with off-list discounts automatically increase within P21. So, the need to rework entire files for each price increase is not necessary. Over the entirety of Ryan’s shift into pricing, he took on approximately 50 price files of some of the most critical suppliers that generate the highest level of revenue for Valin.

Without Ryan’s helpful attitude and willingness to learn, we would have been overly impacted on managing all price increases and would have seen slippage in margin throughout the company. Ryan’s positive attitude and ability to quickly adapt to the needs of this organization have provided an excellent service to all shareholders within the organization.