CLIENT

Caterpillar

ROLE

Design Director

TEAM

• Account Manager
• 2x Business Managers
• Design Director
• UX Designer
• 1 Product Manager
• Technical Lead
• 5 Engineers

DURATION

16 Weeks

BUDGET

1.2M

PROJECT OVERVIEW

As part of a broader enterprise modernization effort, Caterpillar initiated a redesign of its decades-old COBOL-based Global Parts Pricing System. The existing infrastructure was outdated, inefficient, and unable to meet the agility demands of a modern global enterprise. The redesign aimed to transform the core pricing engine into a cloud-native web application that could significantly accelerate pricing calculations, reduce errors, and improve global consistency across equipment and parts catalogs.

Working alongside a multidisciplinary team, I was responsible for designing a new user-centered experience for Caterpillar’s pricing specialists and leadership. This included rethinking pricing workflows, improving the usability of complex cost relationships, and introducing new decision-support tools. The outcome would help unify decentralized processes and establish a single point of truth for global pricing operations.

CHALLENGE

Caterpillar’s legacy pricing system relied on manual processes and outdated logic that restricted pricing agility across regions. The system could take up to 30 days to complete a full round of price calculations, severely hindering business responsiveness. Critical tasks such as managing pricing formulas, validating cost relationships, and collaborating across dealer networks were handled via fragmented tools including shared drives, spreadsheets, and email threads.

The absence of a central pricing platform created inconsistencies across systems and regions. Dealers, frustrated by outdated pricing information, began creating their own strategies, leading to fractured pricing alignment and diminished trust. The core challenge was to demonstrate the “art of the possible” with a modern, role-based pricing platform that could support strategic planning, automate routine tasks, and restore confidence in the pricing process.

APPROACH

To ground the effort in user needs, we facilitated over 20 workshops with pricing directors, system owners, and regional stakeholders. These sessions surfaced more than 100 critical business requirements and exposed key usability pain points. Based on these insights, we developed two fully interactive, role-based prototypes that reimagined how pricing professionals would manage, simulate, and optimize complex pricing scenarios.

Parallel to the UX work, the technical team built a cloud-based proof-of-architecture capable of reducing pricing run times from weeks to seconds. The solution enabled pricing professionals to model “what-if” scenarios using AI-driven insights, simulate changes across millions of SKUs, and understand downstream impacts across product relationships and dealer networks in real time.