By John Nicholas
Answers Systems corporate offices are in Oldsmar, Florida. We have a secondary office and a Tier 4 data center in Chattanooga, TN. We also maintain a field sales office in Evansville, Indiana.
ContractPro® is our contract management solution for food manufacturers. We support the management of their agreements with distributors and operators.
ContractPro® provides foodservice professionals with a high tech, online solution that allows users to input, approve, and track the performance of their distributor and bid/ chain operator agreements.
Our value proposition is pretty simple, we do not allow the payment of invalid claims. For tenured clients, we save them 15% of total dollars claimed. For new clients, the savings ranges from 20 - 25%. We are also able to enforce business rules for distributor earned income on street and chain business, as well as broker commission payments for same. We provide opportunities for improved productivity/reduced overhead. We also give real-time visibility into the performance of your distributor and operator trade deals.
Potential ROI
Trade promotion management is approx 12% to 15% of sales
(Technomics estimate).
Trade promotion management claims are overstated by an average of 15%.
(That 15% includes every kind of claim error one could imagine)
For example, a company doing $500 million in sales, would have total trade of about $60 million X 15% error rate = $9 million of overpayments
A quick review of workflow: Your sales organization enters their agreements into ContractPro® where they are routed through an approval process customized to your business rules. Our system monitors compliance & performance of the contracts.
We also provide connectivity between the various industry Networks/Portals; e.g., iTN/CaRMA; FSE and Sysco.
Through an integrated process, we take claims and billback information directly from distributors and operators and compare it to the contract terms. We audit the claims against your contracts, and approve claims passing audit. About 75% of claims pass audit and are paid by check, before the distributors can deduct. The remaining 25% of claims have errors that must be reconciled before payment.
If the distributor deducts, we quickly identify which deductions are invalid, and have a push-button rebill process that allows the client to collect a high percentage of invalid deductions. This process is successful since we operate with very accurate/timely data.
Our analytics and reporting system shows in real time such things as performance of a contract, whether a distributor or operator is in compliance, who is buying and who is not, detailed profitability, etc)
Our client base includes some of the top names in the industry; e.g., Kraft Foods NA, Unilever NA, Nestle, J. M. Smucker Company, Starbucks, Land O’ Lakes, PepsiCo, Hormel, and Campbell’s, and others. With an extensive community of manufacturer users, great ideas about improving our application and services are constantly brought into our development pipeline.
The Answers Systems master database contains over 600,000 Operators and 2,000 + distributors. Due to our commitment to mapping every operator and every distributor to a master record, all of our customers gain knowledge about this information due to our communities’ input. No proprietary information is ever shared across customers.
Hardware/Software Requirements
As a hosted solution, our Trade Management application requires only a web connection and Internet Explorer v6.0 or higher with Javascript and Cookies enabled.
For the Operator
We also help restaurant and operator groups increase revenue and improve processes. I am hoping to schedule a webinar with you to better show you our value proposition. If you will send me available dates and times I will get it set up.
Our ValuTrak® system:
• Makes absolutely sure that you get the monies owed to you from manufacturer rebates
o (We invoice your manufacturers, collect the monies and pay it to either your central office, or pay to your individual units or a combination of both)
• Acquires, maps, and scrubs sales data from almost 2,000 different distributors
• Enforces distributor pricing agreements
• Tracks unit compliance
• Provides detailed Volume Reports at your fingertips by manufacturer, by distributor, by SKU, by unit location
Our ValuTrak® clients include everyone from the US Airforce to Choice Hotels, Buying Groups, and large pizza chains.
Answers Systems was founded in 1986 by foodservice professionals. We leverage all of our 130 full-time employees toward the constant improvement and evolution of our application and services.
Our team includes Six Sigma green belts with expertise in Lean process improvement methodologies. Our Project Management team, Business Analysts with Six Sigma certifications and Quality Assurance team are all part of the group that contributes to; requirements collection, project execution and quality product/process delivery. . All these processes are monitored and implemented within a consistent and centralized Project Management Office team. We have 40 full time IT engineers We are SAS 70, Type II Certified and we are Sarbanes Oxley Compliant.
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operators,
trade promotion management,
contract management,
business intelligence