Across many industries, Rebates are used by Manufacturers as a powerful tactic to improve customer loyalty. In this blog, I would like to walk you through an example with respect to a challenge associated with the rebate related processing.
In the Animal Health space, typically there species classified such as Swine, Poultry, Equine etc. and there are manufacturers who actually specialize in making drugs for those species. Manufacturers include companies such as BI, Merck, Zoetis etc. The wholesalers also play a key role in the supply chain as they closely work with retailers, clinics etc. ensuring that the drugs are available at the point of need. The way sales moves across the stakeholders is pretty complex.
Periodically, The wholesalers share sales data with the manufacturers through FTP, portals or other mechanisms and then it is responsibility of the manufacturer to calculate the rebates for the end clients and make the payouts.
The process of calculating the rebates is fairly complex because there are complex rules that guide the rebate calculation process based on purchase $, quantity and other parameters and sometimes, seasonality comes into play as well.
Challenges:
In Rebates, there are various systems at play. A CRM system such as Salesforce where all the customer data resides, the rebate system where all the calculations happen, the warehouse where all the data resides for reporting, other systems where sales data is stored and finally SAP from where the $ get distributed to the customers. Ensuring that the data is as expected across all the systems is a major challenge that impacts trust and efficiency of the program.
Solution:
To effective solve the reconciliation problem, FocalCXM partners with Datagaps to automate the reconciliation process across various systems. Our administrators define the rules for Data Quality, Reconciliation and create data flows in DataOps Suite from Datagaps. Once the flows are defined and automated to run at specific intervals, DataOps Suite reconciles the data across multiple systems, emails any differences across the systems so that administrators can understand the reasons for the differences and take necessary actions:
Benefits:
1. Productivity gains
2. Trustworthy data sets
3. Reduced Cycle time for rebate calculations
In a future blog, we will write more about the mechanics of the process.
Email contact@focalcxm.com to know more
