Collaboration is a process that allows a group of people to come together and work towards the accomplishment of a common goal. In business, you and your trading partners share a common goal of achieving profitable growth from your rebates, so why are many trading relationships adversarial or treated as an afterthought? With significant advancements in cloud-based workflows and file sharing technology, the opportunity for multiple parties to collaborate on a deal using a single platform has never been more achievable.  

At Enable, our mission to enable trusted trading relationships to serve customers better together. That’s why we have not only created an online portal called Collaborator within our rebate management software but we have taken it one step further and launched Partner Dashboard to place your insights into the hands of your trading partners and members.

What is Collaborator and Partner Dashboard?

In simple terms, Collaborator is an online portal you can share with trading partners, allowing them to view and interact with all the trading programs they are a part of. Partner Dashboard is an extension to Collaborator so you can share the insights obtained from Progress Tracker with your Collaborators whether you are use Enable for customer rebates, supplier rebates or managing your buying group. Providing all of your trading partners with trading information in a standard way accessible in one central location makes managing rebate programs more efficient and helps to facilitate common processes.  

If your supplier is part of your approval process, they can also log in to the Collaborator app to sign off your plans through a streamlined UI, providing a much quicker and easier approval process that reduces friction in agreement negotiations. Collaborator also supports comments on plans and deals, providing a hub for you to nurture your trading relationships and facilitating negotiations if your proposed deals aren’t quite right! With an extensive activity log and visibility of all users who have viewed your plan, you can rest assured that commercially sensitive information isn’t being shared with the wrong party.

Using Collaborator and Partner Dashboard

After receiving an invitation to collaborate from your trading partner, your Collaborator home page will show pending invites alongside any plans that have been shared with you. In one location you can effortlessly have crystal clear visibility of what is being proposed and what has already been agreed on, with the option to view and download PDF versions of every plan. You can view and add comments at any time for trading programs which you have access to. Gone are the days of sifting through emails to find specific versions of agreements, creating spreadsheets to track the progress of negotiations and then disputing what has been agreed even after all of that effort!  

After selecting a plan and downloading the PDF you will be able to provide your individual sign off for this proposal at the click of a button. Each trading partner will have a list of collaborators which you can easily manage, with each collaborator requiring an email address to allow for invites to be sent. You can also manage permissions for collaborators by simply providing them with view access or sign-off access. After sending the invite to a potential collaborator they will be required to create an Enable account, which allows us to provide them with all of their collaboration information in one place rather than having an individual collaborator portal for each trading partner. One central hub for all of your trading agreements!

The efficiency doesn’t end there! Customers also using Enable often receive requests from their Collaborators to provide reports, insights and attainment. Traditionally this can be a slow or infrequent process for both the users receiving these requests and the Collaborator. With Partner Dashboard, you can share a link to your progress tracker with your Collaborator, and they will get a filtered view just to their data!

How Can I Benefit from Collaborator and Partner Dashboard?

If you can remove the friction involved in negotiating an agreement with your trading partners and provide a central location specifically designed to provide all of your trading partners with effortless access to agreements and proposals, both your team and your trading partners team can reduce the admin burden involved. With a reduced admin burden, you both have more time to use rebates as a strategy and secure long term mutually beneficial partnerships.  

Utilizing Partner Dashboard within Collaborator can provide you and your trading partners with insights needed to make strategic buying and selling decisions. For a Buying Group, the partner dashboard makes it easy to see a single source of truth between the group and its members. You can increase the value you provide to your members by showing them how close they are to rebate thresholds and incentivize their behavior to boost their bottom line.

For those managing supplier and customer rebates you can:

• Engage more easily with your trading partners and align on goals  
• Reference on the same data set, ensuring the decisions you make together remain aligned
• Embrace transparency so you can remain agile and flexible to changing demands and market forces
• Earn more and collaborate to strategically place spending where it maximizes the benefits for buyers and sellers

All of this coupled with Enable’s intelligent forecasting, which allows partners to see months in advance whether they want to course-correct to reach higher rebate tiers or identify spending which can be used more strategically elsewhere. Your commercial team will have more time to assess the benefit of agreements, model different agreements and negotiate better terms – which with the aid of an improved relationship – can allow you to increase your rebate earnings year on year.

Improve Your Trading Partner Relationships Today

So, there you have it – Enable's Collaborator and Partner Dashboard allows you to easily and securely share your plans and progress with your trading partners, giving you the ability to work together to boost your rebate earnings. Let’s stop thinking about trading agreements as contracts to be fulfilled and think of them instead as mutually beneficial relationships to be improved on. Give your team the freedom to focus by signing up to Collaborator and Partner Dashboard today!