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!