By Derek Gittoes, VP of Supply Chain Management Product Strategy, Oracle
The current economic challenges make it difficult for many organizations to pursue new business opportunities, but wholesale distributors face a unique hurdle—one that can amount to millions of dollars left on the table each year.
Simply put, a wholesale distributor’s new business programs are often extremely complex due to various objectives, terms, and thresholds, and it’s common for a distributor to have hundreds of trade programs in place across its supplier base. This makes accounting for the programs in financial systems, as well as matching sales accurately against the program terms, difficult at best.
Complicating the issue further, management of these trade programs is often a manual, time-consuming process. This not only hinders productivity, but can lead to rejected claims, disputes with suppliers, and missed sales—meaning that potential rebate revenue goes unclaimed. Add it all up and distributors are forced to watch significant revenue opportunities fall by the wayside—and for distributors with narrow margins, it can mean the difference between profit and loss.
To help our customers overcome these obstacles, we are introducing Oracle Channel Revenue Management, part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain Management (Oracle Cloud SCM). Oracle Channel Revenue Management helps organizations efficiently manage their trade programs by automating processing and settlement in the cloud. This will not only enable customers to streamline business processes, but also help them to increase overall revenue, profit, and market share.
The new solution’s flagship feature is the Supplier Ship and Debit process, which allows distributors to manage special pricing agreements with suppliers to help ensure that all potential sales are realized, claims are efficiently handled, and supplier rejections and disputes are minimized.
With Channel Revenue Management, customers can:
Simplify modelling of special pricing agreements, reducing administration costs and maximizing the profitability of their supplier programs
Improve accuracy of rebate calculations, eliminating duplicates and reducing supplier rejection and disputes
Automate the execution and settlement of supplier programs to streamline business process and improve cash flow due to timely submission of ship and debit claims
The new solution also enables our partners to expand into distribution industries that rely on complex trade programs to manage their business and remain profitable.
