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 month—and that’s just electronic data (Eclaim). When you add in paper claims from operators and distributors, those numbers go up. From those millions of lines of data every month, steps must be taken to make the information actionable.
- For every manufacturer SKU we track, we have a distributor SKU cross reference that we must make. Our current mapping ratio: for every manufacturer SKU, there are 21 distributor cross-reference SKUs (1:21).
- We track over 26,000 manufacturers (food and non-food) cross-referenced against 120,000 aliases (2:9). Why so many aliases? Claims come in showing the manufacturer name differently—ABC Co. versus ABC versus ABC Company versus ABC Company Inc.
- All of these and more data elements (almost 600,000 tracked operators, for example) come together to create new data—rebate amounts, analyses for assessing contract ROI per trade spending agreement, volume reports, business reviews, etc.
Answers Systems provides data management and technical expertise to support foodservice trade promotion management from contract creation to claim/rebate settlement to complex analyses and reporting. Contact us if you would like to discuss your trade promotion management (ContractPro solution for manufacturers) or contract compliance initiatives (ValuTrak solution for operators).
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contract management,
contract compliance,
trade spending,
trade promotion management,
rebate settlement,
data acquisition,
data mapping