How new organizations are onboarded - Enable

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Rethinking rebate management in your organization

Enable rebate management software has been developed and is implemented by Enable, a leading developer of business software for a number of industries, including building materials, wholesale distribution, retail and buying groups.

Leading companies such as as Travis Perkins, Wolseley, SIG, MKM Building Supplies and AD all realized significant financial benefits and improvements in their supplier relationship management process through the implementation of Enable.

Enable has developed an implementation process which takes all stakeholders involved with the rebate process through a structured program in order to achieve a rapid return on investment.

Enable onboarding is the first phase of this process and has been designed in a way that, upon completion, your project team will have all the tools and know-how to prepare and manage their rebates in Enable that utilises all of today’s rebate management best practices.

Launch

Every organization is different, and in order to make sure that you gain the expected benefit from Enable we undertake our launch step.

During launch, we look to understand how your trading agreements are drafted, approved and executed in your business. We understand the roles and relationships between the business functions involved — typically purchasing and finance but often including category management and sales.

We also seek to understand the types of deals that you enter into, usually looking at the most complex deal types. Enable has a comprehensive set of deal mechanisms built in, and we assess the fit between the standard library and your deals.

Once we have undertaken the launch step, we can assess whether it would be possible to deploy Enable using pure configuration, or whether customisation via our 6-week development cycle is required. This will usually depend on the complexity of business needs and the level of integration required with other business systems.

Product configuration

Enable is a highly flexible software solution that can be adapted to meet the needs of many types of businesses.

This is achieved using configuration — essentially setting up the software using a series of switches and settings to correctly model your business structures, such as product hierarchy, branches, brands, members, suppliers and the approval hierarchy to sign-off deals, as well as the deal mechanisms and structures to model your trading agreements.

Enable has many hundreds of settings and it is the job of our onboarding team to configure the software to meet the needs of your particular business. Sometimes it is possible to achieve a Enable implementation with pure configuration. In other cases, the following additional services may be required.

Data preparation

In order to allow deals to be set-up, Enable needs to access your master data — ERP integration is therefore a vital component of a successful implementation.

As a minimum, this usually includes details of supplies, branches (or members) and products. In addition, Enable needs access to the transactional data with which it can reconcile deals in order to calculate deal earnings.

Enable can use a variety of transactional data, including: purchase invoices/orders, sales invoices/orders, and goods received notes. The exception to the above is in some organizations such as buying groups where this data does not exist within the business at the level of granularity needed, in which case it can be fed in by suppliers using Enable's supplier portal.

Enable includes a set of standard interfaces to bring in this data, as well as the supplier portal which can be used as the primary or secondary method for receiving transactional data. In our experience some organizations need assistance in bridging the interfaces they can make available to Enable's standard interfaces — something we can help to specify, build and test.

Enable integrates with major ERP systems such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft Dynamics. In addition it can pull in data from bespoke in-house systems so often found within wholesalers, builders merchants and buying groups.

Enable can interface with a range of leading BI tools including Business Objects, QlikView, Tableau as well as purchase-to-pay solutions such as Ariba, Fourth and Proactis.

Business analysis

Complexity exists in many organizations where there are a broad range of business systems, departments and ways of working.

When a business has grown by acquisition or has many legacy systems, processes and particularly complex deal structures, then our business analysts will ensure your organization gets the most out of Enable by getting into more in-depth analysis of your business and IT landscape than can be achieved in the launch step of onboarding.

It is likely that both Enable and your IT function will need to carry out standard configuration to achieve integration between Enable and your data and full alignment with your business processes. Our business analysts will help to agree the work that needs to be carried out and author clear specifications for the work.

Our business analysts have in-depth knowledge of best practice methodologies for calculating, distributing, reporting and accruing rebate. Because clients are often transitioning the management of rebates from very dated legacy systems or even Excel spreadsheets there is often a need to design the business rules for how this needs to be implemented in your organization — something that we assist many of our clients with.

Hosting and support

Enable offers a fully hosted and supported service, partnering with leading hosting providers such as Rackspace and Microsoft Windows Azure.

Enable is focussed on the long-term value created by Enable and will provide a comprehensive technical support service via our central Helpdesk facility:

  • A Client Services team available via Enable’s Client Portal, telephone or email every business day, 52 weeks of the year between the hours of 08:00 and 18:00 GMT;
  • Weekly status update / planning phone calls;
  • Proactive application management, performance and error feed monitoring;
  • A committed level of responsiveness in the form of an agreed set of SLAs.

Software development

Custom modules to fit your organization’s exact needs.

Enable also offers a software development service to build additional modules and functions unique to your business that seamlessly fit around the Enable core product. This is carried out in a way that ensures the core Enable product is not compromised, and ensuring compatibility with future Enable software releases.

The company has a professional services team of 80 staff and has grown revenues every year since its inception 22 years ago.

Enable is a Microsoft partner with the Application Development competency. Many of our software developers are Microsoft Certified Professionals. Our processes are UKAS certified for both ISO 9001 and ISO 27001.

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