Rebate management blog - Page 3 - Enable

At Enable, we carry out rigorous testing to ensure that we achieve quality throughout our applications. We use manual testing, particularly at the later stages of development, to observe the functional behaviour and full user experience. However, automated tests also play a key role when building a complex application, from simply verifying that behaviour meets the specification to reducing costs and undesired bugs throughout an application’s life.

While automated testing is crucial to ensuring quality in any software product, it is often harder to immediately appreciate from the outside. Provided the software is meeting the current specification why should our clients care how we got there?

11 min read

In our experience with businesses managing complex rebate agreements, we have come across multiple different styles of rebate deals. Some of these deals are rather self-explanatory, such as a fixed monetary amount or a fixed percentage of total turnover over the term of the deal.

However, as the area of rebate grew, rebate agreements became more complex and specific in order to provide maximum benefit for everyone involved. Why get a low rebate rate on all products (some of which you may never stock!) when you can negotiate a higher rebate rate on one of your most traded products?

Incentive rebates explained

What are they?

Incentive rebates are used to encourage purchases across a specified group of products. The incentive offered by the manufacturer or supplier means that the more you trade with this partner over the course of the deal, the better the rebate rates you receive. This helps to promote loyalty with certain trading partners and protects the supplier from the risk of their trading partners engaging with the competitors about similar products.

6 min read

There are two sides to the customer rebate story: the customers’ side where, historically, retailers and distributors have not always been paid the full value of the rebates they should have received; and the manufacturers’ side (those who offer the incentives in the first place). When the old enmities are laid to rest, though, customer rebates can be the best thing since sliced bread for customer success. Customer rebates have a bad reputation In the past, those giving away rebates were accus...Continue reading

Most businesses have a process in place for forecasting for the future. Forecasting, commonly defined as “the process of making predictions of the future based on past and present data and most commonly by analysis of trends”, is about being able to account correctly for earnings throughout the year. This may be an informal process — such as when an individual estimates the future using their experience or gut instinct, or a more formal process using tools such as Excel / other systems. Either...Continue reading

Automatic certificate renewal

The problem

Security is a major concern at Enable and as such we utilise the HTTPS communication protocol to encrypt our website traffic between the server and our users to protect our websites against attacks from malicious third parties.

In order to use HTTPS communication, an SSL/TLS certificate must be provisioned from a certificate authority. Historically this has required certificates to be manually purchased and installed for each domain owned by Enable, which had a high financial cost and increased the workload of our team.

Wild card certificates

To reduce the management overhead and costs Enable has utilised wild card certificates (such as *.deal-track.com), these allow HTTPS communication across multiple domains, which reduces the number of certificates that need to be purchased and managed.

7 min read

Strategic collaboration with manufacturers could be a huge driver of revenue and profit for construction-industry distributors. So why have so many given up on trying to make it work? The supplier-distributor relationship in building and construction is at a tipping point. The rise of Amazon has meant customers can buy building materials and fittings direct from the manufacturer, freezing out the middleman. That’s led to quite a bit of bad blood, with distributors feeling betrayed by suppliers...Continue reading

Today it seems we hear about a new major data breach every week; regular attacks on high-profile companies proving that when guards slip, malicious and opportunistic attackers make their advance. While traditional firewalls and other network security controls are an important layer of any information security program, they can’t defend or alert against many of the attack vectors specific to web applications.

As an ISO 27001 certified company, Enable knows that security is a significant concern for our clients, and so it is a top priority for us. Every new feature or software solution that we deliver has been designed and developed to be as secure as possible, incorporating the latest security defences.

6 min read

Supplier rebate deals should be a win-win, benefiting manufacturers and distributors alike. But too often they lead to distributors losing revenue, and suppliers losing trust… Supplier rebates make great business sense. They build on the common goals of manufacturers and distributors, to provide mutual benefits — manufacturers gain extra sales and customer loyalty, while distributors enjoy lower costs. At least, that’s how it should work. In practice, things rarely run so smoothly. Most distri...Continue reading