by Janet Zlokovich
As we get older, we gain new knowledge, become more experienced and realize that staying healthy will require us to do more than when we were younger. The right diet, exercise, vitamins and regular doctor visits are all part of the regimen we need to consider for sustaining good health and maintaining a positive quality of life for longevity. Similarly, trade spend management can draw many parallels from this mind set for creating a sound framework and functionality of Answers Systems contract solutions for foodservice. Just as your healthcare provider completes a patient history to better understand how to best manage your health, we do the same analysis for the care and implementation for our client’s contract requirements to achieve successes and sustainable longevity in contract and rebate management. Regular check-ups to assess our tools and services helps assist us with the diagnostics to determine if we need to recalibrate and adjust the track we laid to accommodate the larger population or improve the quality of results.
During the early years of contract and rebate management, there were not many requirements for formalizing the agreement between the manufacturer and Contractee. Some agreements were actually documented on cocktail napkins and translated from the disposable paper. Fast forward to the future, there is now a common infrastructure platform that meets the distinct and unique requirements for each Answers Systems’ client. I could go on considerably longer talking about all the changes in foodservice and how we have supported them through our tools and services, but would like to focus on one initiative that is very important to our company. The GS1 standards adoption - http://www.gs1us.org/sectors/foodservice/foodservice_initiative_roadmap are foodservice industry standards that we are ready to embrace for our data alignment. We now have a GS1 Company Prefix and are prepared for this journey.
This year Answers Systems celebrated our 25th anniversary. During this time of reflection on how far we’ve traveled in this business, we take pride in knowing we are recognized as the leading provider of Contract Management and trade spending Solutions for the Foodservice industry. Without the knowledge and experience gained through managing trade spend for our manufacturer and operator clients in the preceding years, we wouldn’t be able to chart the path that has put us at the front of the race. The phase “You Don’t Know What You Don’t know” is a motivation for learning more and expanding our knowledge so we can represent and recommend the industry’s best practices for contract and rebate management. We are poised and ready to react to the constantly changing foodservice industry and challenging economic climate. Every penny counts in this business!
As more trading partners engage in contract negotiations, they need a qualified service to offer guidance and support in addition to the optimum software that will be the right diet to achieve the “single source of the truth” when they communicate and publish their agreement to all the contract parties. The bricks along with the mortar will be the necessary vitamin to sustain a strong foundation throughout the contract lifecycle. Our trade spend management settlement will benchmark the contract against the submitted claim for reimbursement so we know tractability of the negotiated terms by your sales organization is mandatory.
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