contract management
There are 26 entries for the tag
contract management
By John Nicholas
Answers Systems corporate offices are in Oldsmar, Florida. We have a secondary office and a Tier 4 data center in Chattanooga, TN. We also maintain a field sales office in Evansville, Indiana.
ContractPro® is our contract management solution for food manufacturers. We support the management of their agreements with distributors and operators.
ContractPro® provides foodservice professionals with a high tech, online solution that allows users to input, approve, and track the performance of their distributor and bid/ chain operator agreements.
Our value proposition is pretty simple, we do not allow the payment of invalid claims. For tenured clients,...
by Stacy Jackson
The amount of data involved in moving food from farm to fork is overwhelming. Even narrowing the focus to data related to foodservice trade promotion management still leaves millions and millions of data to contend with at any given moment. When we take it down to just the universe of Answers Systems’ client data, it’s still quite a bit of information that must be dealt with in order to pay rebates, perform contract management functions, and analyze trade promotion spending.
Answers Systems handles incoming claim data for manufacturers and operators at an average of over 5 million lines per...
by Tracy McQuilkin
When performing rebate settlement for our foodservice manufacturer clients, we often get the following question regarding pendings:
Why can’t we just override the pending and pay it?
Short answer: we can, but we don't recommend doing this.
When you override a pending, all you are doing is fixing that one claim instead of addressing the root cause of the claim in error. Why not take a few extra minutes in your contract management process and either update the contract in the ContractPro® solution, or ensure that your customer has the correct contract terms on file in their system?
If you update the contract...
There is a tremendous amount of energy and focus placed on organizations to select and implement great reporting and analytics tools to help plan and analyze their trading relationship data. The need to select a great reporting and analytics platform for information analysis is paramount to managing a superior business. It is, in fact, no longer a differentiator but a requirement to stay competitive.
Great job – You are a manufacturer sales representative setting up a trade promotion contract for a large chain account and you figured out how to double your volume on the contract.
Not so great – You got twice the increase in volume by selling your products for half the listed price!
Synopsis – You may be the shortest tenured sales representative in the history of the example company. I put that together after only the minimum “required economics” courses in college.
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...
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
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
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
If you monitor Twitter, Apple-related news, or technology gadgets in general, you probably know that the Apple tablet is being revealed - about right now, in fact (1:00 EST).
For years we’ve all tried to get the sales force to stop using the cocktail napkins as a preferred contract delivery method. Now with the advent of Apple’s revolutionary tablet computer, the game is changing for contract management. The new tablet (and future generations of tablets) will allows our apps to become a "dig
by Greg Hilton
Answers Systems has kicked off an incredibly exciting product development roadmap for 2010. We are focused on delivering focused improvements in our core products, ContractPro® and ValuTrak®. In the design of this year’s major product and service releases, our team focused on some key needs for our customers:
First off, I wanted to say thank you to each and everyone of our our incredible customers. Your continued support of Answers Systems' vision allows our team to serve you each and every day. Serving you, our customers, is the single most important endeavor that we seek to succeed at.
Posted by Stacy Jackson
After reading “The Yadda Yadda Conundrum,” published December 4, in New York Magazine, I realized that a timely statement of the facts could have gone a long way for Tiger Woods. Had he just given an immediate, simple explanation of his car accident to the police, he might not be dealing with all this poking and prying into his personal life. I’m not here to comment on Mr. Woods’ life choices – just pointing out that a statement of concrete facts may have saved him a
Posted by Bud Hilton
I recently complimented one of our managers at Answers Systems for stepping out on the edge and challenging a client on changing some of the practices they were doing in favor of a proven “best practice” way of accomplishing a task within their contract management system. After covering relentless arguing points and hovering in the “no change-safe zone”, the client agreed to make certain concessions and change their position and practice. I can’t express strongly enough h
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
Implementing a disciplined, standardized trade promotion management process may seem like a daunting task, but it is essential in today’s business environment. Some of the risks associated with poor contract and trade spend management are:
Lost contracts and documentation
Missed deadlines and opportunities
Compromised operator and distributor relationships
“Maverick” contracts that leave your company open to risk due to unauthorized changes to contractual lan
posted by Stacy Jackson
Today's post is an overview of the concept of The Seven Critical Steps in Best-Practice trade promotion Management. These steps have been identified and document by Answers Systems based on over 20-years of contract management and claim settlement experience in the foodservice industry.
Posted by Stacy Jackson
While at work this morning, I had one of those random memories pass through my mind. It was of a scene from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You may remember this part where Slartibartfast (crazy name, huh?) tells Arthur Dent about a race of super-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings who built Deep Thought, a supercomputer designed to calculate the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Much to the beings’ dismay, Deep
Posted by Stacy Jackson
Celebrity chefs and shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Top Chef highlight the creative, exciting side of the restaurant business. The contestant developing the exquisite menu item that will keep himself or herself safe from the wrath of Gordon Ramsay makes for great television.
Although they can be a big a part of a restaurant’s success, I don’t think the folks dealing with supplier contract negotiations will ever get their own shows. “America’s Next Top Purchasing Agen
If you Google “change management,” you get about 240 million results. As you can imagine, this is a hot topic and has become quite the buzzword. What is it, and when did this become one of the most integral parts of managing the success of a business?
According to Wikipedia, Change Management is “the structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state.” Also, common sense (and Einstein) says that doing the same thing over
Posted by Sue Sanford
As the Training Manager for the ContractPro solution at Answers Systems, I have seen many contracts created by a Sales Rep/Broker that cannot be used to pay on the claims submitted for that contract. The creator (Sales Rep/Broker) logs into the ContractPro application and finds a pending or learns that their customer has not been paid. What do they do now? Some will go to the pending claim and enter a comment to use the contract they created while others will investigate
As Data Acquisition Liaison, I work with foodservice distributors to set up electronic data transmissions for trade spend contract management. In today’s competitive economic environment, electronic data and automated file transmissions are key to maximizing trade spend billbacks that occur on the end-of-the-supply-chain. Answers Systems has both manufacturer and operator clients so there are many opportunities to streamline data interchange for all 3 sides of the foodservice triangle.
My
The easy answer is “both strategies, all the time”, and most manufacturers will say that they do this religiously. However, if you peel back the onion one will find that certain times are more favorable for choosing one or the other as a primary 80/20 strategy and putting appropriate resources behind it.
There really are only a few tactical applications that fit each of these strategies. Gaining new customers is sometimes the most costly way to expand business. The manufacturer must allocate
by Greg Hilton
In this series on problem solving frameworks we are taking a look at solving problems using methods learned from the book, The McKinsey Way by Ethan M. Rasiel. If you are checking in from the original post, “The McKinsey Way” is a peek into the problem-solving framework used by one of the world’s most successful business strategy-consulting firms, McKinsey & Company.
This is the last of the three part series and speaks to, “what to do with the data you capture.”
posted by Stacy Jackson
If you haven't already begun thinking about the decision handed down in April on the Feesers, Inc. v. Michael Foods, Inc. & Sodexho, Inc., you may want to start now. Not just start thinking about it, but reviewing with your legal department the ways you have been contracting/pricing. (By the way . . . this litigation started before Sodexo dropped the “h” from their name, thus the old-school spelling in the court documents).
The Feesers ruling is tough for some o