With the end of the year rapidly approaching, this would be the perfect time to try out the new Progress Tracker app. You’ll be able to easily monitor your targeted program lines so that you can plan your year-end spending to maximize your return. Updates to Messages and the Deals app should be well received, and our internationalization efforts are proceeding at pace. Among the usual plethora of performance and usability enhancements, you might find actionable notifications particularly handy.
These and many other updates are already available to test in your UAT channel. Deployment to your live channel will take place on Saturday, October 23rd.
The Progress Tracker is a new application within Enable that will allow you and your business partners to monitor the progress of ongoing deals. It presents information about your agreements that will help you identify opportunities to improve efficiency and maximize potential earnings.
To access the Progress Tracker, you can click the new tab on the Trading Programs homepage. It can also be accessed from within the system's breadcrumbs under the Trading Programs menu. Upon launching the app you will see the potential earnings for your agreements with all of the organizations that you deal with. For each organization you will see your total spend, the total rebate, and the time until your earliest program line end date. Selecting an organization will give you a breakdown of the individual program lines including:
Currently the Progress Tracker only shows information for targeted program lines. Future improvements will allow you to track the potential earnings across all of your program lines. Note that the Progress Tracker can be enabled independent of the Watchlist app.
Access to the Progress Tracker can be managed by your Administrators. It is possible to allow a user to access the Progress Tracker for a subset of trading partners.
A common rebate scenario is that one's transactions are recorded in different units than those used in a rebate calculation. For example, perhaps you sell boxes of beverages to distributors by the pallet, but you only offer them rebate based on the number of individual boxes sold. Previously, only our Fixed Unit Rate mechanism supported unit-of-measure conversion to make situations like this easy to input, but we've now expanded this option to apply to all unit-based targeted mechanisms. We've also updated the UI for increased clarity when managing these conversions, which means you can say goodbye to unit-induced bookkeeping headaches.
As we continue expanding our French language support, new internationalization features have been added to Collaborator. The CSVs collaborators use to upload and download data and the trading program PDFs used for sign-off can now be configured for French language and formatting conventions. They can now also better accommodate time zone changes. This useful update lays the groundwork for further internationalization of Trading Programs.
The Messages app is a platform for collaboration between your company and your trading partners that allows for the organization-level management of raising tickets and requests. A better alternative to email for your B2B communications, we have built it to increase visibility to stakeholders, improve tracking of tickets, promote efficient and purposeful interactions, and to enable you to easily evaluate the quality of a trading relationship. With Messages, all your important communications are centralized, giving your entire team visibility and ensuring that you always have a clear audit trail.
In preparation for pushing out the app for widespread use this quarter, we have made a few minor albeit important optimizations. In addition to the speed optimization in relation to user permission checks and large trading networks, we have continued to fine tune our backlog subscriptions and message loading. We have added the ability for users with Messages access to be automatically subscribed to all backlogs with an option to later unsubscribe. Alternatively, users are able to manually subscribe to individual backlogs or messages by clicking a 'Follow' button. Users who are subscribed to a backlog and are included in the 'From' or 'To' Organization on a ticket itself will be automatically selected to receive email notifications about that ticket.
Our next phase of work on the Deals app will allow you to begin reporting and viewing the earnings for the Special Pricing Agreements in a Special Pricing Earnings report. The report will have many of the features of the standard reports in Trading Programs. You will have the option to preview the report or to download a CSV, to use multi-trading-partner selections together with overnight scheduling for large reports, and to save particular parameter sets in the 'My Reports' area. The latter will allow users to test and verify their Special Pricing Agreements by comparing the earnings from the report with the known earnings of the agreements.
We are also working on automatic inheritance between contracts so that when a Special Pricing Agreement is created from the enrollment of a customer pricing contract and a distributor support contract the included items common to both will be automatically inherited by the SPA. The items on the parent CPC and DSC will continue to define the superset available on the SPA while users with edit permissions will continue to be able to deselect automatically-included items to remove them from the Special Pricing Agreement. This will make the process of creating a Special Pricing Agreement much easier and more time efficient.
Among the dozens of subtle enhancements to performance and usability rolled out every six weeks, there are some that deserve special mention. This time around that distinction has to go to the new actionable notifications. System notifications requiring action by the user are being made clickable so that you can click to complete the action directly or to navigate to the appropriate part of the system. This feature will appear gradually over the next few months and will appear first in notifications about signing off deals and about invitations to collaborate.
Also notable are some tweaks to the new bulk payment upload wizard. The user interface is now more intuitive and easier to use, and if there is an error with an upload the wizard will now provide more descriptive error messages and offer the option of restarting the process. You might also notice a small upgrade to the Organizations app, which will now allow admin users to filter the list of organizations to show only those with whom there is some minimal number of trading relationships.
In line with Enable’s commitment to release a product update every six weeks, we have numerous new features under development that will be ready to test in your UAT environment on Thursday, October 28th. Deployment of this next set of features to your live environment will take place on Saturday, December 4th.
Included in the next update:
If you have any questions about current or future updates, please contact us at projects@enable.com or book an appointment with a member of the Customer Success team. As always you can log a ticket with any feedback or questions you might have. We look forward to hearing from you!
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