PriceMaster Plus (PMP) was designed to reduce frustration over the collection of competitor price data—a constant concern for the upper management of major retailers. Nearly three-dozen major retailers in the United States have incorporated the software into their existing corporate pricing strategies because PMP offers them what traditional data collection methods cannot—near real time access to price data that is timely, accurate and actionable.

As important as it is to the retailers that utilize the software today, PMP might never have been created if Jitney Jungle Stores of America hadn’t sought out Donna Osburn in the mid 90s and asked her to write a custom software application for their company. Osburn founded Software Plus in 1990 with the intent to focus on software design, development and deployment, but the call from Jitney Jungle would redirect the focus of her company for the next 12 years.

Osburn redesigned the concept of the software Jitney Jungle asked her to create to better suit their needs. Jitney Jungle was thrilled with the results and the success they experienced with PMP led Osburn to seek out other retailers that could benefit from the software. She would go on to find 21 such retailers, including Kroger, Kmart and SuperValu, as well as several other retailers listed on the “Fortune 500,” “Top Grocers,” and “Top Wholesalers” lists. The success of PMP eventually led Osburn to focus her business on this retail application.

Despite the growth of Software Plus and the success of PMP, Osburn felt the software needed to be updated in order to take advantage of new technology that would give retailers more flexibility while helping them obtain more accurate price data faster than they could before. The original handheld computers used to collect price data were limited on memory and the backend database was susceptible to data corruption. Focusing on enhancing the original PMP software, Osburn created PriceMaster Plus Enterprise Edition (PMEE).

PMEE utilizes state-of-the-art handheld technology that provides more capacity and capability and operates wirelessly. The desktop component of the software was also improved in order to provide more effective price data analysis and reporting. The modifications to the original software resulted in a retail application that is more flexible and efficient and can accommodate a much greater volume of data. In 2002, Kmart became the first of the existing PMP users to change to PMEE.

Today Software Plus is solely focused on the continual maintenance and enhancement of PMEE. As the competition in the retail industry becomes more and more fierce, the demand for immediate access to competitor price data continues to increase. While many price data collection services boast quicker turnaround time of price data than ever before, PMEE is the only competitor pricing system that allows the retailer to cost effectively collect only the prices they want, when they want them, using the latest and fastest technology available.