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Trade Promotion vehicles like Rebates, Charge-backs, Ship & Debit, Special Price Authorizations, etc; are a necessity in business models that involve wholesale distribution structures (For example: Food & Beverages, Life Sciences, High-Tech; Industrial & Electrical). Most enterprises spanning both manufacturing and wholesale distribution business models are currently adopting informal processes & tools to manage claims arising from these Trade Promotion vehicles. This presents significant challenges as outlined below:

• Spreadsheets based Trade Claims Amount Calculations is a source of errors and delays. There is no assurance that all Trade Claims that have to be submitted (to a manufacturer) will be captured. Furthermore, this takes up significant manual effort to administer thereby adding to costs.



• Trade Agreement terms, Pricing & Calculation Logic between Trading Partners have to be enforced in a consistent manner so as to accurately validate and calculate Trade Claims. Complex Pricing Calculation Logic, for example: Government Pricing Calculations for Life Sciences like AMP, ASS, FSS; have to be applied consistently too… In the absence of a system-enforceable Agreements and Pricing Calculations Management capability, significant errors and delays can occur.



• Trade Claims Processes are still being managed completely outside ERP system boundaries and this prevents ERP Trade Claims related business processes from leveraging the automation and process streamlining potential that ERP systems represent.
  
  To deliver a solution to the above problems, a flexible and powerful Agreement Management infrastructure is needed. This infrastructure has to be able to support multiple operational challenges encountered by enterprises…



• Rapidly, Consistently and Accurately enforce Trade Agreement terms, Pricing & Calculation Logic by leveraging a Transactional Engine. Establish and enforce pre-agreed trade agreement terms, pricing & calculation logic. These terms govern the rating, pricing and calculations for various line items like rebates & chargebacks, fees, discounts, incentives, products & options, packages & bundles, metered resource usage, surcharges & taxes.Calculate prices based on unit, flat and percentage based rates; with support for multiple units of measure. Support various kinds of pricing methods like single & double quantity breaks, step functions, user-defined, etc. Also support partner level qualification and discounting rules based on year-to-date volumes and other data as defined in the agreement. The Transactional engine can be seamlessly accessed during Trade Claims Processing, which is driven by ERP systems in most situations, through standardized interfaces.



• Enable non programmers to author and test Trade Agreements and Pricing definitions & logic through easy-to-use GUI tools. This can eliminate the delays and translation gaps associated with more traditional software development and change processes wherein business writes up detailed specifications documents and hands over to IT for programming.



• Controlled change & release management wherein any changes to Agreement logic and rates, go through a pre-configured series of approval steps before being authorized for release. Serial and Parallel approval processes can be configured. As part of the approval process, the impact of the change on pricing can also be understood. If any changes or revisions are required to the definitions, this can be done at this time. After approval, the change is migrated to a formal deployment process. Complete audit trails are available on the history of change performed on the agreement logic and rates and on the comments made by the approver.