We are excited to kick this year off with a wide variety of new features and functionality! Everything in this article is now available for you in your testing channels, and we hope you love the updates as much as we do!

Across the system, there have been a huge variety of improvements to commonly used features including the reporting suite, menu-crumbs, and the hub-switcher. On top of this, we have brought new features such as the support of indirect rebates and the new Messages app. Messages will increase accountability and prevent information loss in your B2B communication. We’d love to hear any suggestions you have on these changes or for any of our apps; just log a feedback ticket here.

The changes introduced here will be deploying to your Live channel on Saturday, March 27th.

Messages

At Enable, our vision is to reshape how B2B deals are deployed, managed and measured to help both sides of the trading relationship succeed. We see collaboration between trading partners as the key to maintaining this relationship, and the use of software to facilitate collaboration has never been more important than in the current climate. As such, we are happy to announce an exciting new application we have been working on – Messages.

Messages is a hub to have structured, topical discussions with your trading partners, making communication with them even easier. The idea is to have a place where:

• Real-time information is visible to all stakeholders;
• A new stakeholder can be enrolled at any time without sifting through a chain of emails;
• You can reduce the dependency on a single individual;
• High-efficiency working practices are provided when dealing with large numbers of requests.

Given the immediate need for a hub like this, we’ve deployed Messages in beta mode. This means you have early access to the new area and don’t have to wait until all functionality has been built for you to start using it. We’d also be grateful to receive any feedback from you to help shape Messages' future development. You can access Messages at the trading partner level or the trading program level. At present you’re able to create and respond to tickets with your trading partners, attach documents and add subscribers – however, we have plenty more exciting features on the way.

If this sounds interesting, click here to read more about Messages, what it is and what you can use it for. Please get in touch with your Customer Success team if you would like a demo of the feature, or alternatively raise a ticket with your request.

Trading Programs

The Trading Programs app is the place for you to store all your rebate agreements, send programs to your trading partners for signing, and report on how your trading programs are doing. To find out more about what the Trading Programs app can do for you, click here.

In one of our earlier newsletters, we announced that we have new functionality allowing you to save frequently ran reports in the reports area. This was a feature that many of you loved, however, we received feedback that it would be useful to rename the reports to make it easier to identify them. Therefore, in the latest build, we have been working on this and you now can customize the name of your saved reports. This can be found in the My reports area of the reporting suite. When you click on the report name, an edit panel will appear which will allow you to type in the preferred name of the report, streamlining the whole process.

In this deployment, we have introduced support for indirect rebates. Indirect rebates are rebates that are based on transactions between two trading partners. It is a rebate earned/paid on a transaction by an organization that is not one of the two parties directly involved in the transaction. An example would be a third organization that is neither the purchaser nor seller in the transaction. In this phase, the initial implementation for indirect rebates features has been carried out. It is worth noting that this is not the finished functionality so any reference to this in the Trading Programs app has been marked with a beta flag. If you would like this turned on in your channel, please get in touch with your Customer Success team or raise a ticket with us.

As part of this update, we have also continued to make enhancements to the Trading Program PDF to ensure the PDFs are available in the optimal format for both you and your trading partners. In our last update, we introduced the new PDF branding which we hope will be an enhancement to all. To ensure this is a non-disruptive improvement to you your Customer Success team will be in touch to organize how best to implement the new functionality.

Whether a program line is set to retrospective, fully retrospective, or non-retrospective this will now be displayed directly under the Target Bands header for the program line, rather than within the Explanatory Text section. This has been modified to be more compact and will display a brief definition of what the selected option entails for a Trading Program with the given mechanism. The Explanatory Text section of program lines has been removed for improved clarity. Any information present in this section will either be removed or will be moved to its own dedicated section, as will be the case with the Notes section.

Target bands for all targeted and growth program lines will now be displayed as intervals, such as 100,000 - 199,999. For growth program lines, the information will also be shown on the Incorporated Baseline target, which uses relevant baseline data to display the exact target band that will need to be met in order to achieve the relevant earning/rate. The value of the baseline will also be displayed above the target bands in the case of growth program lines.

Where there are multiple terms item fields configured under a single group heading for a Trading Program, the labels for the populated fields will now all be displayed as opposed to just the group heading and inputted values.

Other PDF improvements include UX improvements to make the display of program lines and dimension items clearer and more readable, as well as improved performance of PDF generation.

We’ve also brought more enhancements to the trading partner reconciliation report. This report allows you to extract information to help you reconcile your numbers with your trading partners. The transaction date filter has been modified to also filter the Incentives tabs. Previously, regardless of the transaction date filters, figures for all dates would be shown for incentive rebates in the report. The growth column has also been enhanced and will be hidden if no program line matches both of the following criteria – has a growth target type mechanism, and has a start date equal to the transaction date from filter value. Both of these changes will now make it even easier for you to reconcile your figures with your trading partners. As the trading partner reconciliation report is optional functionality, please get in touch with us if you would like to see a demo of this report. In the meantime, you can learn more about this report here.

Also new in Trading Programs:

• Improved resilience of the program line replication mechanism.
• Support for emails input with angle brackets (e.g. 'Example <example@enable.com>' or '<example@enable.com>') have been introduced, so that email addresses can easily be copied from external services.
• Various modules within Trading Programs have been updated to the new Enable color scheme, providing a more consistent experience.  
• The dimension collection items selection page has been updated with a prominent button to navigate back to the program line edit page. Previously this was a small [x] button.
• A new setting entitled transaction owner has been introduced to the import transactions page. This is in preparation for use in the Deals app, so transactions pertaining to other organizations can be uploaded. Keeping the default settings will maintain previous functionality.
• A new Goods flow setting will also be added to the import transactions page, allowing the user to select between sales or purchases, to indicate the direction of the flow of goods. This setting only affects the transactions used in the Deals application by default but can be enabled for program and program line types. Please speak to your Customer Success team to learn more.

Collaborator and the single view of trading programs

We have continued to enhance and roll out the single view of trading programs. Previously this was only available for you in the Trading Programs app within the (beta) listing page, but this has now been rolled out for collaborators, creating a unified view that you will all share.

Your collaborators will now be able to start utilizing the single view of trading programs. This unified view will allow for more precise discussions between you and your partners because you will both be referring to a similar interface. This also means you can directly link your collaborators to the exact agreement you want to discuss (or vice versa) because these utilize the same URLs.

This view can be activated for some users by using the new beta listing toggle on the trading program listing.

We have also made the following changes:

• Calculation status information directly on the trading program listing.
• Trading program deletion from the trading program listing (subject to permissions).
• Limited bulk deletion to protect your data from accidental data removal.
• Workflow status indicators within trading program listing.
• New column sets and enhancements on trading program listing.
• A person invited to collaborate will now be automatically assigned to the partner organization if it has one. This allows them to quickly utilize other areas of Enable such as Tickets and Messages.
• In some scenarios, it was possible for a collaborator to see the tile for transaction imports when they would not have access to upload transactions. We have now ensured this is properly removed in the appropriate scenarios.

Deals

Once fully released, the Deals application will be the perfect place to store your Special Pricing Agreements (SPAs) with your trading partners. We have made several improvements to the Deals application to not only allow you to store your agreements but also work towards managing the cash and payments associated with them.

Firstly, a new setting has been added to allow you to add a payment frequency to your ad hoc deals. This will allow you to set how often you get paid for an ad hoc deal i.e., monthly, quarterly, annually. This will then create payment lines for each payment frequency period per ad hoc deal. Ad hoc deals will now also be displayed alongside your program lines in the payment allocation area. This means that when allocating payments everything is in one place; you will be able to allocate across all your different agreement types e.g., trading programs and ad hoc deals.

We’ve also improved our filtering functionality in the Deals application to allow you to search across your B2B deals with ease. The enhanced search options will now allow you to see all B2B deals as well as trading programs when searching for a trading partner. It will also allow you to search for B2B deals under trading program types and in the payment allocation area.  

Also new in the Deals app:  

• A new Interaction with rebate setting has been created in the mechanism details area to determine how rebate affects the value of claims made under a given contract.  
• The start and end date for an ad hoc deal will default to the date of creation.  
• You will now be able to indirectly include products based on the product grouping and a Select all button.
• Mechanism field values can be populated for product group/delivery combinations for different contracts. Any special pricing agreement will inherit these where they can be edited.

What’s coming up?

In line with Enable’s commitment to release a product update every six weeks, we have a ton of updates coming up that will be ready to test in your UAT environment on Thursday, 1st of April. Deployment to your Live environment will take place on Saturday, 8th of May.

Included in the next update:

• Payment allocation and a payment history report will be added to our B2B Deals solution, as well as configurable contract types for ad hoc Deals.
• Additional controls and features will be added to Enable’s reports, including separate target and earnings reporting and reports including zero earnings.
• New calculation mechanisms will be added to Deals to better incorporate sales data.

If you have any questions regarding our current or upcoming updates, please contact our Customer Success team at projects@enable.com, or book an appointment with a member of our team. As always, you can log a ticket with any feedback or questions you have about the latest set of releases. We look forward to hearing from you!