February's update provides you with the opportunity to add more in-depth analysis tools to your DealTrack solution. A significant amount of effort has been put into further developing our new Watchlist app, alongside a wealth of background and performance improvements.
With ever-more complex special pricing agreements being created in an already vast and competitive market, the ability to efficiently maintain pricing flexibility between manufacturers and distributors has become essential.
Both supplier and customer rebate have been prominent for many years. Their aim is incentivizing purchases and sales and protecting profit margins. A focus on rebate management has helped merchants, buying groups, wholesale distributors and retailers to drive mutually profitable growth with suppliers whilst improving cash flow and reducing risk.
US-based research has shown that alongside rebate agreements, manufacturers and distributors are increasingly collaborating around ‘special pricing agreements’, commonly abbreviated to SPAs, and often referred to as ‘contract support’ in the UK building materials sector.
By necessity, SPAs are collaborative arrangements whereby manufacturers and distributors assist each other for mutual benefit. Initially these types of agreements entered the market to leverage scale, but they have since evolved into a more widespread tool used to grow sales and market share by allowing trading partners to work together in offering a more competitive price than their rivals.
Enable hosts most of its DealTrack clients in Microsoft Azure, taking advantage of the wide range of resources it offers, including Azure SQL Databases. In general, each DealTrack client will have their own SQL database within Azure containing their own data, varying wildly in usage patterns and performance needs. Unfortunately, this can make it difficult to decide on the appropriate performance tiers, often resulting in the over-provisioning of resources based on peak usage and over paying. Azure attempts resolve this issue by allowing these databases to be placed in an elastic pool, where all databases in said pool share resources, allowing performance to stay high while keeping costs low.
Enable has taken this one step further by taking advantage of these elastic pools, coupled with the fact that the performance tier of the elastic pools can be scaled dynamically without any down time for the system. We have implemented a solution capable of providing high performance as and when the system requires it, while scaling down the performance tier during periods of low activity.
This results in Enable being able to offer its clients a solution with a solid user experience and strong computational performance, while truly minimizing the associated running costs.
Enable is pleased to announce that its new client portal is now up and running!
We established our Client Services team in May 2017 to provide our clients with a reliable resource to assist with both ongoing support and the delivery of bespoke project work. As our number of clients continues to expand at a significant rate, the ability for the Client Services team to deliver the right support in real-time could become increasingly challenging. We, at Enable, believe that our clients want more than just someone who solves their existing problems. Rather than being reactive, we make great efforts to be proactive. That’s why we are providing all our clients with access to an online client portal.
A client portal is a secure digital gateway that allows organizations to interact with their clients, share files, discuss, plan, organize and manage tasks in a private online environment. Client portals have become increasingly popular in recent years due to the higher levels of security that they offer when transferring data between users, along with the ability to upload and manage much larger file sizes than those imposed on email.
One of the main benefits of having access to a client portal is its 24/7 availability. Our clients will be able to access information when they need it, from any device. They won’t have to wait until the morning to contact the Client Services team in order to log an issue or get an update on a current ticket.
On Saturday 8th December 2018, Enable employees and their partners celebrated another year of success and innovation at the RSC’s The Other Place for our annual Christmas Party!
Christmas parties have become increasingly popular for companies over the years, with the huge appeal giving employees the opportunity to bond and help people from other departments get to know each other a lot better. These types of get-togethers are also an excellent chance to give our exceptionally loyal and motivated employees recognition for the hard work that they are doing and rewarding them for it. Retention is something that Enable prides itself on as we expect to grow to over 100 employees by 2020.
Over the past 18 years, Enable has forged strong relationships with some of the finest universities, bringing in the brightest students that they have to offer — with 79% of our analysts and developers graduating from one of the top 25 featured in the Times 2019 UK rankings! We regularly hold recruitment events and have formed close ties to the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham. This gives us the opportunity to engage and network with students, whist giving them a real insight into our company.
We are particularly focused on recruiting on high achievers in numerate subjects, with 66% of our employees holding an undergraduate degree in either Maths or Science, and 41% attaining a master’s or PhD in their chosen field of study. This provides us with exceptional employees who not only possess outstanding technical skills, but also the ability to translate that knowledge into highly effective business solutions.
Chris graduated from the University of Gloucestershire with a degree in Popular Music before joining Enable as a Client Services Manager. A Client Services Manager focuses on the delivery of software projects to Enable’s clients and works to support both test and live applications. Rather than passing this responsibility to third-parties, Enable provides software support in-house. This leaves our clients safe in the knowledge that requests will be resolved efficiently and promptly. Chris offers his thoughts on his experience so far as a Client Services Manager at Enable.
DealTrack is fully reliant on the data that gets imported. With this in mind, December's update showcases some valuable improvements made to the data reconciliation reports available. Alongside this, there are several new feature enhancements and performance updates that have been made throughout the system to enhance DealTrack's functionality.
Special Pricing Agreements (SPAs) are often considered a necessary evil in most industries. Whilst they can assist you and your trading partners in winning business over your competitors and allow you to enter new markets, the accompanying complications of managing SPAs can leave you wondering if they’re really worth it. Some businesses we have engaged with wish to cease dealing with special pricing agreements due to the burden of managing them! There is no doubt that special pricing agreements...Continue reading