Sodexo-ITN Contract Management Initiative

by Brian Maloney

It still amazes me every day how complicated this foodservice industry is.  When people ask me what I do, they listen to my answer and say things like “wow, I never realized there was a need for that.”   Once you find yourself in this industry, you never leave.  It sucks you in.  You find yourself sitting at a restaurant table with friends looking at the back of sugar packets just to see who the distributor is.  I’ve been in “the industry” now for 16 years and every time I think I have it figured out, the industry throws you another curve ball.  I think the new Sodexo-ITN initiative is just that . . . a curve ball.  It’s something new to the industry, and we all have to adjust.  I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this new initiative, it’s just different. 

If you don’t know what this new initiative is, this post is probably not for you.  If you’re one of the hundreds of foodservice manufacturers dealing with Sodexo, and more specifically a National Account Manager at one of those manufacturers, then this post will give you some insight into how Answers Systems is working with ITN to ensure efficiencies for our manufacturer clients and their ContractPro® users while meeting Sodexo's business needs.

Depending on who you are, this initiative means something different to you.  I work at Answers Systems.  We have many foodservice manufacturer clients that have contracts with Sodexo.  These clients use our ContractPro® trade promotion management solution to enter and manage their contracts.  We want to eliminate as much duplication of their effort as possible when it comes to maintaining their Sodexo contract within both the ContractPro® solution and ITN CaRMA tool.  So, what this means to us is that we have to build a bridge that takes the contract out of the ContractPro® solution and, with the help of ITN, automatically loads the contract into ITN’s CaRMA tool.  Our goal is to save our clients time and help them preserve and/or gain efficiencies. 

Answers Systems is here to help you if help is needed – you can talk to others in the same shoes you wear.  You are not alone!  Future posts will go into more detail on the actual initiative, what we learned along the way, and how the process is working.   Hope you enjoy. Technorati tags: ,

Print | posted on Wednesday, August 12, 2009 8:27 AM

Comments on this post

No comments posted yet.

Your comment:

 (will show your gravatar)
 
Please add 1 and 6 and type the answer here: