The Deal Economy - Page 7 - Enable

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

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 contrac...Continue reading

In our experience, many businesses that receive rebate revenue from suppliers, don't have the means to be able to check that it is correct. They are completely reliant on suppliers to accurately calculate and make the payments. Because they tend to record rebate agreements outside of their financial system, these businesses are unable to match the cash received against amounts owed from their rebate deals, and for that reason they don’t set up a debtor in the same way that customers are treated....Continue reading

When people ask us about integration, the answer is simple. Enable can accept data from anywhere so long as it is detailed enough. We aren’t tied to any particular ERP systems or EDI providers, and we have over 20 years integration experience. There probably isn’t a system or standard that we haven’t come across already. The bottom line is that if you have line item data on goods received, purchase orders and supplier invoices somewhere in your digital infrastructure, then you are ready to im...Continue reading

This business had used a bespoke system to manage rebate earnings for some time, but rebates were calculated at a very high level and were based on data provided by suppliers rather than their own data. They reviewed the situation and estimated that by making calculations at a more granular level of detail, they could significantly increase the level of rebate claims within the existing deal structures. They moved to Microsoft Dynamics AX for their core financial system, but it was clear from th...Continue reading

This building supplies company has over 50 branches and is growing. They recognised that having smooth business processes would be an essential foundation for their growth plans, and whilst most parts of the business had been systemised, the area of rebate management remained an anomaly. They were using spreadsheets because their core ERP system (Kerridge) did not support their requirements. They approached Enable to discuss the suitability of DealTrack to their needs and were keen to discover...Continue reading

With over a thousand branches and hundreds of thousands of stock items, this business had a huge issue with managing rebates. Everything was being managed on spreadsheets, and they experienced many of the usual issues such as version control and human error. They commissioned a firm of consultants to review their options and invited several software companies to tender for a solution. Their aim was to find a solution that automated as much of the rebate reconciliation process as possible and the...Continue reading

This business manages over 1m stocked items, the majority of which have some kind of associated rebate deal. Within the first 12 months of operation they recognised a 200% return on their investment in DealTrack software. They had previously built a rebates module as part of their bespoke financial system. However, whilst this had been built to specification, over time it lacked the flexibility to manage every type of deal. As a result, spreadsheets were used to control many elements and inform...Continue reading

Buying groups, as the name suggests, are formed to give buying power to smaller independent companies through purchase consolidation. Whilst buying groups don’t typically have control over the systems implemented by members, they do need information from members in order to negotiate the best possible deals on their behalf. It has long been recognised that buying groups can have difficulties in committing to purchase volumes with any degree of certainty. That impacts both the buying group’s abi...Continue reading

Twenty-fifteen saw the highest level of merger and acquisition activity in the UK since 2007 according to research by Experian. In fact, over 6500 mergers and acquisitions were completed in the UK in 2015 with a total value of £433bn. This was the highest value of deals since 2000. Brexit, the US election and US legislation changes have been blamed for a slight downturn in M&A since then, but nonetheless according to Dealogic the average merger or acquisition in 2016 was $104.2 million, and...Continue reading

In order to prepare for major negotiations with suppliers, businesses often have to extract historical data from multiple systems: buying groups need information from their members' systems, newly merged businesses need information from different parts of the group. We have seen cases where managing large volumes of transactions with (largely) manual processes, such as spreadsheets, can have a detrimental impact on profitability, cash flow, supplier relationships and ultimately the performance o...Continue reading

You may be reading this blog for one of a number of reasons, e.g.: Your ERP system doesn’t have a vendor rebate module Your ERP system has a vendor rebate module but before implementing you want to draw up a requirements specification to check on the match to your business needs Your current vendor rebate module needs some work to meet your business needs You have more than one ERP system operating within your company, but need one module that sits across them all to manage vendor rebates acros...Continue reading

Learn why organisations are looking for specialist rebate management software to solve their issues, and how our implementation methodology leads to not only accurate rebate claims, but significant profitable business growth. Step 1 Taking control of rebates, gaining efficiency and claiming missing profit, not leaving 'money on the table by: Create suppliers & their hierarchy Modelling existing agreements Bringing in transactional data This results in: Rebates precisely calculated...Continue reading

Today's IT landscape in most large corporations consists of disparate systems: Cloud apps On premise ERP systems Cloud-based ERP Local systems and spreadsheets Others As a result, the world has moved from ERP systems being at the hub to integration services being the key. Out-of-the-box ERP integration are not sufficient for most scenarios and are being surpassed by ERP agnostic applications that provide enhanced functions and shared data with ANY other systems. A rebate management system nee...Continue reading