Our latest updates have built upon the solid foundation that we’ve created for the Partner Dashboard and Executive Dashboard, while allowing us to roll out more features and tools for our Special Pricing Agreements (SPAs) functionality. These changes allow you to work more collaboratively with your trading partners, view data more reflective of the deal types that you are working with and allow you to forecast your future rebate earnings more accurately.
The most recent batch of updates are now available to test in your UAT channel, and deployment to your live channel will take place on Saturday, December 10th. Information about our product update process and a full calendar of deployment dates are available in our Help Center.
The Enable Partner Dashboard is a dynamic tool that lets you share progress on trading programs with your trading partners. This exciting addition to our range of products helps you engage more with your trading partners, driving value for them and helping you both to make impactful, timely and strategic decisions. The Partner Dashboard is now also available for Buying Groups and other membership organizations.
With a large network of members, it can be challenging to manage rebates transparently and to share information effectively with the right people. Member engagement around Group Rebate Targets is also particularly difficult to build and maintain. The good news for member organizations is, as an Enable customer, you can grant your members direct access to Partner Dashboard. At a glance, they will be able to see the best margin opportunities and their contribution to individual and group targets.
While it’s important to promote collaboration among your members, we also make sure that you, as the data owner, can control permissions easily. Collaborators can be given visibility permissions from a single view in a concise dashboard.
Being able to manage collaborator access according to the program line type, allows you to be confident that your data is secure and that members only see data on the trading programs that are relevant to them.
We have continued to work on expanding the core functionality of Partner Dashboard and we are pleased to let you know that the platform now fully supports program lines with discounts and/or deductions. This exciting new addition allows you to share a broader range of program lines with your members.
Discounts can easily be configured for program lines as a percentage off the transacted value, while Deductions will show a monetary value. This feature is new to the Partner Dashboard and provides greater clarity into the true value of your ongoing deals.
Partner Dashboard also makes it easy for your members to see which target band they are forecasted to hit. This is where you can drive value for your group members – enabling them to make real-time financial decisions and course corrections to maximize their earnings. Accurate financial forecasting is mutually beneficial and providing your partners with these valuable insights and transparency into their progress helps build trust and further strengthen your business relationship.
Another beneficial feature that we’ve added to the Partner Dashboard allows you to make any indications, statements, or clarifications you believe your trading partners need to be aware of when using Partner Dashboard. We call these “Custom Disclaimers”. Currently, this feature can only be enabled and edited by your Customer Success team. Contact us and we’ll quickly set up a custom disclaimer line to be displayed in your Partner Dashboard.
As we roll out Special Pricing Agreements (SPAs) for manufacturers and distributors, we are making sure to develop tools and practices that allow you to transition your current SPAs to Enable and are encouraging accessibility and transparency across all aspects of our software. To serve this purpose, we are undertaking a few changes and improvements to our SPA functionality.
The first among these changes is the finalization of our migration tool which allows you to mass upload the agreements from your legacy systems into Enable. No need for manual setup of agreements – just supply them in bulk and Enable will do the rest. This latest build slot has allowed us to build on the reliability of this tool and integrate improved contract validation to guarantee agreements are as unambiguous as possible.
You can now retain an audit trail of the different, changing versions of your contracts. This ensures that your renewals are monitored over time, allowing you to confirm whether your SPAs are accurate and up to date – or if they require renewal.
As part of our effort to add to our SPA offering, we are working to integrate special pricing and rebate agreements with one another. Since both agreement types use the same set of transaction imports, we are augmenting these imports to allow users to assign each transaction line to an SPA and are enhancing transaction reports to better supplement SPA information. These changes can lead to more precise transaction procedures, tracking the owners and agreements for sales and purchases.
Interactions with rebate don’t stop there though. In our search to accommodate trading programs between manufacturers and distributors, we have made changes to ensure your single-channel agreements are consolidated and efficient. As part of this guarantee, we have revised our approach to deductions, using results directly from your trading programs rather than expending resources and calculating them separately.
Our Executive Dashboard now allows you to zoom in on your workflow status to see your current progress on renewals. As you renew each program you can see what stage of workflow you are which gives you a quick, clear insight into the progress of your trading programs as they go through the renewal process.
Also new is the ability to choose to view by transactions within the Executive Dashboard as well as to view renewal values in terms of contract spend, instead of earnings. This allows you to see which renewals need to be focused on soonest, letting you prioritize renewals in terms of spend or time scales.
As always, we continue investing in our platforms and users with QA improvements and changes. These include changes to what triggers recalculations, improved inter-channel maintenance, and general diagnostic and health improvements. We are continuing our work on improving interoperability between features to provide an even more flexible platform that empowers our Engineering team to build new and more robust features.
Changes to Collections (your data structures) have usually required the addition of new dimension collection attributes. This type of update used to be done on a case-by-case basis via our Engineering team. To resolve this issue we can now add attributes to an existing collection with a default value. With a proper tool in place, we expect you will experience quicker resolution to issues relating to data structure changes through onboarding and support.
Testing new features, experimenting with new data feeds or fundamentally optimizing your Trading Program channels is risky. To mitigate and support you through this process, Enable will clone channels. This means for short periods of testing you have access to a system which is a snapshot of real data. This can take a few days. However, we have invested in building tools to streamline the process so we can reduce the time these requests take.
In line with Enable’s commitment to release a product update every six weeks, we have numerous other new features under development that we are targeting to complete and have in your UAT environment on Thursday, December 15th. Deployment of this next set of features to your live environment will take place on Saturday, February 11th, 2023.
Have you joined our exclusive Rebate Strategist community? This is your 24/7 hub to chat with other distributors, manufacturers, and retailers about rebates, from simple management all the way to complex, revenue-driving strategies. Here is a notable example of a recent thought leadership discussion:
Don’t miss out on future rebate discussions, join the conversation today!
Please do reach out if you’re interested in learning more about any of our new features. If you have any questions about current or future updates, please check out our product roadmap, contact us at help@enable.com, or book an appointment with a member of the Customer Success team. As always, you can raise a ticket with any feedback or questions, you might have. We look forward to hearing from you!
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