Tuesday, March 09, 2010
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by John Nicholas
The Foodservice Industry is changing. Foodservice has evolved to a $600 billion industry. Along with growth comes “growing pains”. Manufacturer’s trade promotion spending now totals more than $70 billion annually. Where foodservice trade spend was just a black hole that companies tried not to think too hard about; the elephant in the room has grown to extent that it can no longer be ignored. There is a new awareness of the need for more accountabilities, and greater transparency in not only where the money is going, but what is the bang for the buck? Up to this point, many companies have tried to manage trade promotion spending with solutions that are geared toward retail/grocery. It does not work! I hear time and time again from companies how they want a solution to manage both the retail and foodservice sides of their business. That solution does not exist! There is no one size fits all solution! The food service industry is unique in its culture, vocabulary and processes. As a result, companies employing retail oriented solutions struggle to manage trade spending dollars and track operator performance in the foodservice vertical. Processes lack data integrity. Contract information is stored in multiple files at various locations. There is no transparency into the business. Many companies have very little idea of what is being sold where, let alone have a way to measure the effectiveness of their trade promotion spending. Answers Systems Can Help! We have developed a system that is completely devoted and dedicated to managing the foodservice side of trade promotion spending.
Our full-cycle contract management center provides a powerful tool for creating, managing and analyzing your distributor and operator deals. Additionally, our software can help you with the reconciliation and settlement of customer claims.
- Collection of sales/billback data (from almost 2000 distributors and operators with approximately 70% of the data being electronic)
- Management of contracts (capture terms, approval process, monitor compliance & performance)
- Claim reconciliation and settlement (verifies and reconciles, and settles terms of agreement against the claim)
Our push button rebill process, (for ineligible deductions), is successfully collecting up to 80% of everything rebilled.
Analytics and reporting
- What accounts are in compliance with your agreements
- What accounts are underperforming
- Profitability of an account
- How geographies, customer groups or sales people are performing
- What sales impact any marketing activity has on your business
Give us a call. We would love to take a deeper dive and show you the significant hard dollar ROI that could add to your bottomline!
Monday, March 08, 2010
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Release offers enhanced security options, time-saving features, and powerful analytical tools for foodservice manufacturers
Answers Systems, the leading provider of foodservice trade promotion management solutions, deployed the ContractPro® version 4.2 release this month. The version 4.2 release provides features aimed at enhancing security of client instances of the ContractPro portal, increasing user productivity, and providing access to robust new analytical reports in the new ContractPro
by Sue Sanford
One of the number one questions we receive through our support line is, “I amended my contract and it won’t let me change the dates, why?”. The answer is that the user made the wrong selection during the Manage Contract selection for the action that they needed to do. There are three options during the Manage Contract function which have very specific purposes and should not be considered interchangeable.
- Amend is to make changes to an existing contract like adding a sku or a distributor.
- Renew is used to change dates of a contract and since the renewed contract will its own effective/expiration dates, you will can make other changes as well like sku, pricing, distributors, etc.
- Copy is used a shortcut to creating similar contracts quickly by copying the guts of the contact to a new Contractee.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
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Tuesday, March 02, 2010
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by Tracy McQuilkin
When a distributors takes an invalid deduction the question comes up on whether that amount is large enough to attempt to collect that money. This is a question many of our clients have and the answer varies.
We have some clients that collect over 80% of what they re-bill and others that collect close to nothing. Why such a huge difference? I guess it all depends on how confident you are with your contracts.
The biggest reason for a distributor to submit for something different than the contract we have on file is they have a different contract than we do. Why is that? Why not create one contract and use it in both places? The client that collects the 80% of re-bills does exactly that. The ContractPro® application is used for the only copy of the contract and that same contract is handed to the customers.
Having two different contracts not only frustrates the customers because they don’t get what they are expecting but also creates a lot of extra work on you, the client. The simple cure, one contract, have customers use the ContractPro ID on the claims they submit. You will have less re-bills and those that you do have will be easily retrievable.
Friday, February 26, 2010
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I was reading a post on-line a few days ago about both the President and Congress agreeing that things are improving in our nation’s economy. Jobless numbers finally took a small decline and consumer confidence is up (even just a tiny bit) for the first time in many months. Funny though, ‘Things looking up’ when our national economy is facing what seems to be an insurmountable year-over-year budget deficit just does not seem to make sense. It is like saying, “Gee, my car is really driving much b
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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by John Nicholas
Todd is a CFO for a mid size foodservice manufacturer. He is frustrated! He just asked his Director of Finance to provide him with a report on the dollars and cents impact of raising the price on one of their SKU’s. He simply wanted to know, based on last year’s sales, what the price increase would mean for their bottom-line. It seemed like a simple request on the surface, but the Director of Finance explained to him, that before she could get the numbers to Todd, she needed
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
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I may be one of the loneliest movie-goers around after I make my confession: I didn't like Avatar.
If you have resumed consciousness after reading that shocking revelation, I'd like to tell you why before you totally write me off as a know-nothing hack.
I didn't like it because I didn't like the story. The artistry and technology were amazing, but the movie was LONG and there was something that irked me for the first two hours that I couldn't quite put my finger. Then at 2 hours and
Monday, February 08, 2010
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by Tracy McQuilkin
Deductions are something every manufacturer we work with does differently. It seems no one has found the perfect way to handle deductions that is consistent across all companies.
We recently had a deep dive with a client’s deduction team. Most of the confusion was related to terminology and lack of understanding of what it takes to clear a deduction. Job shadowing was suggested to help with this client.
How do you handle deductions? What makes it so hard with your organization? We'd love to hear your feedback - click here to let us know what is working (or not working) in your organization.
Technorati tags:
deductions,
foodservice,
manufacturer
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
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Throughout recent history the Foodservice and Trade Spend Management industry, as well as much of corporate America, has used really cool big words to describe trends and philosophies.
From the early eighties, we had Total Quality Management (TQM), a management theory for defect reduction and heightened quality standards. Sun Tzu (that is him on the right), an ancient Chinese military general penned, “The Art of war” and a whole industry of management theorist began translating the logic of