The Deal Economy - Page 5 - Enable

We learn about collaboration from an early age. As children we quickly learn that we need to collaborate with teachers, classmates and team players in order to be successful. "There's no 'i' in 'team' is a common mantra in sports and work teams. And "supply chain collaboration" has been a hot topic for decades. Despite that, there are very few systems that enable wholesale distribution companies and their suppliers in the building materials industry to truly collaborate on their trade agreement...Continue reading

SPAs (Special Pricing Agreements) are a common vendor program in many industry sectors. The program gives a special product discount for verified sales to an ultra-competitive event where in-stock discounts can’t secure the order. Special pricing agreements trace their roots back to the 1970’s but have shown significant growth in the past decade. As B2B e-commerce now counts for an estimated 15% of all orders and grows at 8% per year, special pricing agreements have grown significantly as price...Continue reading

The phrase win-win is probably over-used, but I am going to use it anyway to describe the situation where both parties come out of a negotiation feeling like they have won. Let’s be honest. If you think you won and the other party (your supplier or your customer) feels they lost, then it’s not really a good situation. Price is important, but (particularly in industries like building materials distributors and grocery retailers where margins are tight) time to market, supply chain reliability, in...Continue reading

Vendor monies that support reseller sales are big business. US-based research conducted in October 2018 estimates that, at top performance levels, distributors, dealers, and retailers use $600+ Billion (USD) in vendor funds. Projections from the EU find that approximately €500 Billion (EU) in vendor funds are similarly spent. These funds are found as four primary types including: SPAs — Special Pricing Agreements used by sales to compete with a competitor’s special pricing to a customer MDF --...Continue reading

Rebates, SPAs, claim-backs, contract support are all very similar and at the same time quite different to each other. In essence they are all terms for the money that wholesalers claim from suppliers and manufacturers for selling their products. Some of the key differences lie in how the agreements are formed, whether goods are actually ever handled by the wholesaler, and how the claims are made. Collectively, they are sometimes referred to as “vendor monies”. It is estimated that, annually, the...Continue reading

Whilst many core business systems have some functionality to help monitor trading agreements that involve vendor rebates, most have neither the flexibility nor the extensive range of functionality that is needed to support the increasingly complex world of rebate management. For many, that lack of functionality has resulted in missed rebates and poor accrual accounting. But worse than that, if your business systems don’t support rebate management fully, then the whole purpose behind creating dea...Continue reading

In this blog, we are going to focus on the system requirements for configuring, storing, monitoring, reviewing and operating rebate deals or special pricing agreements. For the sake of efficiency and audit tracking, and to avoid unnecessary disputes, all elements of pricing agreements should be stored in one place. A cloud based solution is ideal for multi-centred operations. Accessible for all The software should provide a central repository that (with appropriate security settings) is accessi...Continue reading

Companies tend to look for specialist rebate management software when they reach a point where their core business systems are proven to be inadequate. This particularly affects builders' merchants, plumbing distributors, electrical distributors, HVAC distributors and others who operate in the building materials industry. These businesses usually have to deal with a large number of complex trading agreements involving rebates, special pricing agreements, retrospective discounts, over-riders and...Continue reading

A rebate management system will help you track, calculate, automate and manage rebates. We have a buyers' guide that outlines everything you should look for in a Rebate Management System, but I wanted to outline my top 12 features in this blog. 1. Complete solution The rebate management system should cover all aspects of your trading relationships from contract to claim. 2. Integration to anything Systems consolidation with any kind of system should be built in — be that ERP integration, EDI, C...Continue reading

Whilst working with a number of organisations across industry sectors such as building materials, buying groups and wholesale and distribution, we have seen a large variety of very complex supplier rebates and trading agreements. These very often involve incredibly complicated performance-based calculations with seemingly endless permutations, and on top of that rebate agreements are subject to periodic review and change. In the building materials sector for example, there are further complicati...Continue reading

If you’re a builders merchant you’ll know how essential it is to ensure every penny counts in terms of your bottom line. So, it’s even more crucial than ever that you don’t miss out on any of the, often significant, sums due to you through rebates. Indeed, profitability for building materials suppliers is often very closely dependent on the amount of rebate they can negotiate and claim and many businesses across this sector tell us that the sheer volume of categories and the complexity of rebat...Continue reading

Failing to claim 100% of rebate due can have a large negative impact on the bottom line for businesses in industries where rebate agreements are commonplace. Finding out why that happens and how to stop missing vendor rebate claims is at the forefront of the minds of rebate accountants and financial leaders all over the world. Some ERP systems have functionality for recording rebate agreements, but often lack the granular level of functionality needed to carry out detailed matching of actual pu...Continue reading

With increasing global competition, ever-more complex trading agreements are being created. Effective management and control of complex trading agreements that include supplier rebates is notoriously difficult. Most standard accounting and purchasing software packages will not cope with the variety and complexity of pricing strategies and rebate agreements. But a solution that is disjointed or based on spreadsheets introduces the possibility of missing data, human error and inaccurate reporting....Continue reading

Firstly, if you’re reading this blog you will most likely to be familiar with what an ERP system (enterprise resource planning) is, but as a reminder it is a type of software that manages and integrates a company’s financials, supply chain, operations, reporting, manufacturing, and human resource activities into one system. Examples of ERP systems include NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, SAGE plus many more. Many ERP systems already have a way of recording contract information and a vendor rebate module...Continue reading

Contracts are core to any business activities, regardless of size, industry, and region. They set out the prices, service levels, terms and supplier relationship and ensure that your company is regularly supplied with their direct and indirect supplies. A study by the Institute for Supply Management uncovered that between 60-80% of all business-to-business transactions are governed by some form of written agreement, with a typical Fortune 1000 company maintaining 20,000 to 40,000 active contract...Continue reading