October 2009 Entries
Posted by Jennifer Grumbling
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, You Tube, blogging, it really can turn into an endless list of social networking outlets for anyone and everyone to connect to, well, anyone and everyone. Whether you’re a business looking to spread the word about a new product or a retiree seeking out your best friend from high school, it’s amazing the reach these tools can have.
Posted by Jennifer Grumbling
When it comes to trade promotion, foodservice manufacturers have some pretty distinct challenges when it comes to contract management. Here at Answers Systems, we have an entire team of Account Managers that handle specific client accounts and try to alleviate those challenges. Our clients are some of the world’s top brands (scrolling sidebar): Answers Systems Clients (I will finish my horn tooting in a moment.) Over the past 23 years that we have been transforming
Posted by Stacy Jackson
Over the years we have learned a lot about what happens in the first 90 days or so after a manufacturer implements a new contract management system. We call it the pain curve. Excitement and expectations for the new system turn into angst over errors that seem to be piling up in the way of pendings, recalculated claims, and deductions. Things improve, though, after a little work. The pain subsides and turns into confidence in the new system - deductions are down (o
Posted by Jennifer Grumbling
So you did it, you finally reached your weight loss goal! The tricky part begins: maintenance. You work hard to get to where you are and then you have to continue to work to maintain what you have achieved. How do you do it? You keep yourself in check; you continue to perform “tune-ups” on your exercise and diet. But keep in mind, in the end, it always pays off.
Posted by Jennifer Grumbling
I recently read an interesting article about chicken, yes chicken. It was about the change over the past year in wholesale chicken prices for restaurant chains. Over the course of the past year, the majority of the time, the price per pound of chicken wings has been higher than the price per pound of chicken breast. This dramatic shift in what is considered the most lucrative part of the chicken has wing chain operators scratching their wings, I mean heads.
Since 1986, Answers Systems has been meeting the unique trade promotion and compliance performance management needs of the foodservice industry. We know the industry-specific requirements and challenges faced by each trading partner, and we understand the perspectives of key stakeholders such as sales, marketing, finance,IT, and purchasing.
As a best-in-class provider of trade promotion and compliance performance management solutions to some of the leading foodservice and hospitality brands in the world, Answers Systems helps clients analyze and understand their contracts, increase efficiencies, identify claim inaccuracies, gain compliance, and improve ROI. In the course of serving our clients . . .
...
Posted by Stacy Jackson
Through our years of experience in helping clients manage their Data Acquisition & Data Management in trade promotion management, we've identified the following potential pain points that foodservice manufacturers face:
* Slow (or NO) submission of claims
* Claim information scattered throughout the organization
* Lack of internal capability to receive electronic claims
* Data mapping of incoming claims
* Matching claims to contracts
* N
Posted by Tom Tipps
Through our decades of experience in managing trade promotion transactions for foodservice manufacturers, Answers Systems is able to validate many of these statistics with real-world examples.
Technomic says, "On average 28% of trade claims are overstated."
For Answers Systems' clients the numbers range from a high of 50% for new clients to a low of 22% of seasoned clients. The critical statistic is that the dollar value of invalid claims totals 15% of the total dollar
Posted by Tracy McQuilkin
A deduction in the Answers Systems trade promotion management solution is simply a status type for a completed claim. Whether we cut a check or a deduction occurs, we still fully validate the claim against the contract stored in the ContractPro® application.
Posted by Stacy Jackson
Last week I posted on the topic of Breaking Down TPM Critical Steps - Standardization & Rules of Engagement, based on the webinar series from Foodservice University and Answers Systems. As promised, here is some information about Back-Office Procedures to employ once you have gone about the process of standardizing your trade promotion management process and defining rules of engagement.
Post by Janet Zlokovich
Everyone who sends a tax return to the IRS (business or personal) wonders, "How do I know the IRS received it?” Most taxpayers and tax preparers in 2009 used IRS e-file to file their taxes. During this process, they did not have to send a single scrap of paper to the Internal Revenue Service. In January of this year, the IRS was predicting the the total number of individual tax returns, both electronic and paper, to reach about 140 million in 2009. And it expects e-fil
post by Stacy Jackson
It’s Monday. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and relax. We are going to keep today’s blog simple enough, but it will change your life if you are a foodservice operator! I am running down the top three reasons why a multi-unit foodservice operator should use the ValuTrak® rebate and compliance management solution from Answers Systems.
Ready? It’s gonna be simple yet mind-blowing:
Posted by Jennifer Grumbling
You are probably thinking what do the Yankees and trade promotion management have to do with each other? Well, you would be surprised.
Baseball can be a tricky business. In a nutshell, the success of the team depends strictly on the players and coaches and their talent and ability for the game. So, one would think that throwing huge contracts and salaries at big name talents to draw them to the team would increase the chances, or maybe even guarantee a chance,
Posted by Stacy Jackson
Recently I posted about the critical steps in foodservice trade promotion management (TPM). The foundation of those critical steps for any TPM solution is standardization. I pulled the transcript of a webinar about Standardization & Communication in Foodservice Trade Promotion Management presented by Roth Block, COO – Answers Systems and Tom Rector, President – Foodservice University®. This information is too good not to share again - at least in this summary form. To
Posted by John Nicholas
I am old enough to remember life before computers. There was no real information to guide business decisions. I had to rely strictly on my good looks and personality. Okay, I exaggerated; I just had my personality to work with. But the point is that I remember a time when everything was based on relationship, not numbers.
“Back in the day”, as a foodservice manufacturer rep, if I had a great relationship with a distributor or operator buyer, many times I could
Posted by Stacy Jackson
Do you ever get songs stuck in your head? I do. Today’s song is “Surf City” by Jan & Dean. “Two girls for every boy” and “I’m going to Surf City where it’s two to one. Yeah, I’m going to Surf City. Gonna have some fun.” It’s kind of annoying, yet it got me to thinking about ratios. Surf City apparently had a 2:1 ratio of girls to boys. I started wondering what kind of ratios I might find in the quarterly report I received regarding our data mapping for our clients' tra
Over the past few years, we have traded a number of thoughts with clients and potential clients on the use of customer-level purchase information to drive sales and marketing initiatives.
Without getting into major minutia, I just wanted to recap Answers Systems' current capabilities in harvesting and reporting this data for CRM purposes. First of all, I would highlight that our system tracks the manufacturer's case shipments into and through distribution to the end-user. The depth of this de
Posted by Bud Hilton
Some of you may have been there calling on foodservice distributors and operators. If you were, you probably pulled on more “screen doors” than fancy glass or wood corporate doors. The business was basically in the streets. Chain accounts represented less than 30% of manufacturers and distributors volume. Most were even sensitive to that percent growing, out of concern that the potential loss of a big customer may harm their overall volume/profit structure. Distributors,
Posted by Greg Hilton
Wikipedia says the term Value Add speaks to difference between the cost to produce a good or service and the sale price. My economics professor in college, “Professor Humdrum,” probably defined it in the same calculating boring and repetitious way (he was good about that). Nothing against monotony, it just seems to go on and on.
Years later in the real world, the term Value Add became less synonymous with economic theory and definition and more about a handy catch p