The Deal Economy - Page 8 - Enable

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

Profitability for building materials suppliers is often very closely dependent on the amount of rebate they can negotiate and claim and many businesses across the building materials industry tell us that the sheer volume of categories and the complexity of rebate deals means that administering rebate claims is a mission critical element of their building and construction business which can be the difference between a decent year and a great one. 100% of our customers have identified previously m...Continue reading

How do you achieve a single ERP system across all businesses in a newly merged organisation? Is a single ERP even necessary? In a newly merged organisation where Oracle, JDE, SAP, Infor and other ERP systems co-exist, consolidation of up-to-the-minute, accurate information for purchasing poses a huge challenge. In a Bain report, they said that one of the reasons mergers and aquisitions fail is poorly managed systems integrations. Where the potential commercial benefit runs into millions, many co...Continue reading

Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activity often starts well before the actual merger with a period of due diligence where the value of the acquisition is assessed. For businesses in the building materials, food, pharmaceuticals and other sectors who buy and sell finished goods, the driver is often increased buying power, and the imperative for due diligence is to clearly understand the value that new buying power could achieve. Carrying out that due diligence work demands extracts of purchase vo...Continue reading

The worldwide building materials sector is buoyant at the moment. According to StrategyR the global construction materials market is expected to grow to $US1.1 trillion by 2020. The biggest growth area is expected to be AsiaPac, closely followed by the US. This should be music to the ears of those in the building materials industry as the demand for construction materials will ripple through to increased demand for industrial, plumbing, HVAC, electrical and other building supplies. But that’s n...Continue reading

In our online guide “IFRS 15 — 7 steps to prepare for January 2018” one of our suggestions is to review every deal in every contract and make it SMART. We think that whilst it’s a good idea as part of financial compliance, SMART deals are good for anyone who manages a contract with complex rebate deals, so we thought we would share it with you. A SMART deal is like a SMART objective in project management terms, namely: Specific Be VERY specific. If a deal refers to “across all product lines”, i...Continue reading

Missing out on claiming manufacturer’s rebates is like negotiating a higher price with your suppliers. It simply shouldn’t happen! That's why we created a rebate management system chosen by several building merchants, wholesale distributors and buying groups. There are many examples in the building materials industry where, instead of agreeing an up-front discount, discounts are given in the form of rebates based on actual volumes purchased. For the supplier, this fosters brand loyalty and mean...Continue reading