By
Brian Maloney
Don’t you hate it when you have to fill out the same information several times while at the doctor's office or when you are filling out a loan application? You end up missing something or rewriting the wrong thing, and then you have to get the paperwork handed back to you. Why can’t they just let me fill it out once and all the places that need that info just automatically get it?? Now imagine if the
contract management process in the Foodservice industry were like this. It’s getting there.
Over the past couple of years we’ve started seeing these “contract portal” concepts starting to pop up, and it looks like more are on the way. The three that come to mind are what USF now has in place that was built by FSEnet
+, Sodexo has one in place that was built by ITN, and Sysco is currently putting one in place. All three of these examples are good for some of the parties and bring value to some key players. For example, USF can now ensure that pricing gets loaded properly in their system and the right company gets that pricing.
That’s good right? It is unless you are the manufacturer rep who now has to re-enter parts of their agreements in several places.
Using our three examples above, let’s take a worse case scenario and play it out. This probably won’t happen in the real world, but I think you get the picture as more and more single-company portals pop up in the industry. So here goes:
Manufacturer A sets up a new agreement with Sodexo. They give a deviated rate that will go thru Sysco, USF, and 5 other distributors. So they first enter the agreement into their own Contract Management Tool, whether it be a homegrown agreement tool or a third party tool. There the agreement goes through their own internal approval process. Once approved, the rep now needs to go enter it into:
- Sodexo’s agreement tool CaRMA,
- USF’s portal via FSE,
- and soon the Sysco portal.
So for this one agreement, the rep now had to enter parts of the contract in 4 places….hoping they didn’t forget anything or make any mistakes along the way. “Why does my contract say $2.50/case but the portal says $5.20/case?” Now let’s move out 5 years, and you can imagine the number of portals other distributors and operators will be introducing. Ugh! There has to be a better way.
Answers Systems is trying to stay ahead of the portal craze. We totally understand why the distributors and major operators find having their own portal attractive and say more power to them. We just don’t want our clients to have additional work added onto them. We insulate them from these redundant efforts--our manufacturer clients will still only have to enter their agreement once. The ContractPro solution will take care of the rest. The ContractPro solution will make sure that
- the USF portal will get what it needs,
- Sysco portal stays happy,
- and the Sodexo portal has all the info it needs.
As more come along, we’ll work with those new distributors and/or operators to make sure ContractPro links with their portal as well. Manufacturer reps have enough to worry about. Asking them to re-enter the same contract several times shouldn’t be one of them.