Rebate management blog - Page 3 - Enable

In case you didn’t notice — Enable has introduced new branded illustrations for the DealTrack product, reflecting every challenging aspect of the rebate management process!

Our company has grown and evolved over the years and we’ve come a long way from our humble beginnings in a stable block in 2000. For over a decade, our rebate management software has helped merchants, buying groups, wholesale distributors and retailers to drive mutually profitable growth with suppliers, whilst improving cash flow and reducing risk. We want our brand to continue to reflect our passion for innovation, and with illustrations emerging as a vital part of brand recognition and user experience, we felt it was time for a change.

We worked in close collaboration with Richard Bookey, Managing Director of Birmingham-based marketing services agency Go Bookey Ltd. Richard has over fourteen years of experience at global based advertising agencies, working with some of the biggest brands, in a variety of sectors. Through Go Bookey’s Art Buying contacts, Richard found 3D illustrator — AJ Jefferies, Director of MDI Digital and represented by Début Art. AJ has produced hundreds of high-end CG artworks and animations for commercial clients across the globe. His addition to the project gave us the much-needed experience required to establish how to bring the Enable brand to life.

We spoke with Richard and AJ to find out more about the creative process and what inspired them.

In January this year, Enable sent three developers to attend NDC London. Since its start-up in Oslo 2008, the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) has become one of the largest conferences for .NET & Agile development with events held in London, Oslo, and most recently Sydney. With Enable primarily developing solutions using .NET, and with the conference boasting several .NET MVP speakers, the conference is a great fit for us.

Technical conferences such as this one can be extremely valuable for training and insight. They also give our developers the opportunity to get out of the office and meet with other developers, as well as the experts working on the technology we use day-to-day. While not all the talks in the agenda will yield gold, there will always be those few that positively impact the work we are developing today and some that will steer what we do tomorrow.

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 incentivising 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 minimising the associated running costs.