Vistex Solutions for SAP provides retail giant with promotion management capabilities that boost operational performance.
Overview This retail giant had complex problems. With 10,000 retail outlets in a variety of retail businesses ranging from restaurants, beauty and clothing retailers to Starbucks and IKEAs, they were drinking from a firehose of data, but had no way to exploit it to their advantage. They needed to automate so their Point-of-Sale (POS) system could scan and capture all retail sales and perform automatic vendor chargebacks, factoring in promotional discounts via their POS interfaces. When products were purchased in one company code and retailed by other company codes, they identified a need to better create and apply global intercompany promotional discounts.They also sought to gain insights into sales margins and rebate data in real time to provide key business intelligence to top management. If there were order fulfillment rate shortfalls, they had no intelligent means to automatically calculate vendor penalty charges. They also needed to identify the stores’ buying income, based on preset rules, from the distribution center or headquarters, in an automated fashion. Their vendor rebate and chargeback issuance calculations were also inefficient and inaccurate, missing the inherent advantages of aggregate views available in a dashboard.
Solution
By investing in Vistex Solutions for SAP, end-to-end automation of rebates and chargebacks processes allowed the company to eliminate outdated manual systems that were inaccurate, inefficient for personnel, and limited in providing insightful or actionable business intelligence. Vistex Solutions for SAP gave them the flexibility to address these complex processes in real time, make live changes to agreements, and update their moving average price and promotions with accuracy and speed. With more accurate rebates and chargebacks in place, the company benefited from the heightened precision driven by Vistex Solutions for SAP. All business units quickly adapted to bringing much-needed simplicity to complexity, enabling the company to scale for future growth.
Results
Vistex made it all add up for this giant retailer, providing the tools to instantly post rebates that impact product costs, while daily sales margin reports could now accurately reflect promotions. Manual miscalculations became a thing of the past, and rebate adjustments now post automatically as agreement changes occur. They also saw a reduction in their provision management and reconciliations. Their Profit & Loss (P&L) statements now reflect standardized rebate income allocations from every store, and cash flow has been improved by more timely vendor debits.
