We’re pleased to offer several useful new features in the latest product update. Among the highlights is the new Executive Summary template for approval workflow, which will make it easier to present summarized information to senior-level approvers. Of special interest to buying groups are the new deal types made possible with attribute-level group and individual target mechanisms. The Finance app will now support the bulk upload of payment records, making data processing much easier for many customers, and parts of the system will now be available in French, which marks the start of our ambitious internationalization effort.
These and many other updates are already available to test in your UAT channel. Deployment to your live channel will take place on Saturday, September 11th.
Before you know it the end of the year will be upon us and your new agreements will need signing off. Enable's Executive Summary can help make this process smoother. It will give you information about expected earnings and convey at a glance how an agreement compares to last year’s deal. It will also offer expected earnings by program line, total non-rebatable turnover and other information useful in the approval process.
The first of many features of the Executive Summary is a baseline comparison view for analyzing how a change in baseline earnings would affect the performance of a program. The values displayed will be the baseline transactions for the new period, the new period and comparison period rebates, and the new period improvement. This will make deal negotiation more transparent by giving a direct comparison between this year’s program and last year’s.
By request we have also introduced a summary view of program line performance. This will help you gauge the potential performance of program lines and will provide insight into how 'stretch goals' would impact growth by showing you the next rebate band and the potential gain if you reach it. If the Forecasting module is enabled, program line forecasts will be pulled through to this area to allow further customization of your sign-off process. Similarly, another section will give a side-by-side comparison of terms item changes between the reference period and the new period. A new setting called Include in Executive Summary? will be available when configuring a terms item, and if it’s selected the item will appear in the terms item changes summary.
With Enable’s rapid growth comes exciting new internationalization challenges. Our platform will now accommodate time zone adjustments and will automatically translate content to the proper format and language. Our new international standards have been applied first to make Collaborator more accessible to our French-speaking users. Language settings are a part of your channel configuration and can be accessed on your set up page.
In the Forecasting app, we've added the ability for users to lock phasing periods based on the latest transaction date. Previously, the phasing periods were locked according to the system date, which meant that late data from trading partners would not always be factored into the corresponding month's forecast. This would make it look like a reasonable monthly forecast had not been attained and would lead to an overly conservative recalculated forecast for future months. The new option of allowing locking based on transaction date will provide a grace period for uploading. With this setting, a phasing period will only lock once data for the next period has been uploaded. For example, if you agree with a trading partner that you'll accept their January data in mid-February, the January phasing period would not lock automatically on the 31st, and you could upload the January data whenever you received it as long as you had not yet uploaded any February data.
In our quest to eliminate manual data entry from your business workflow, we’ve answered your call for bulk payment allocation within the Finance app. Instead of copying and pasting individual payments from your own records and clicking through menus to get this data into Enable, you will now be able to download a template, fill it easily with a bulk copy and paste, and then allocate all these payments in one fell swoop. An allocation wizard will be available to walk you through this procedure step-by-step.
Bulk payment upload wizard.
Example columns from a bulk upload template.
Our functionality for buying groups has also seen an update. Let's say I'm a member of a buying group and my growth has been 25% since last year, but as a whole the buying group has only grown by 10%. Perhaps my rebate should reflect my growth rather than the aggregated growth of the entire group. To address this situation, you will now be able to set individual and group targets separately at the dimension, trading partner or attribute level, and buying group members will be able to earn rebate by attaining one type of target or both. If a program line has either a targeted percent or targeted unit rate deal mechanism, there will now be three options when configuring the target transactions type: ‘Group’, ‘Individual’ and ‘Group and individual’. Under the first option, rebate will be determined by group performance only, while under the second, an individual group member’s rebate will be determined by their individual performance relative to their own target bands. The third option will allow you to set both group and individual target bands, and when a member reaches both targets they will earn whichever rebate is larger.
A new contract type called ‘Pricing Program’ will now be available in the Deals app. A Pricing Program is used to specify a distributor’s discounts with respect to a price list and to thus determine their actual buy prices. This functionality will make it easy to calculate price lists and to view net product costs within Enable, and the Pricing Program PDF will provide a convenient way to review the terms of a Pricing Program with trading partners. The flexibility to add as many as 4 additional discount tiers to a discount on each product will allow users to represent off-invoice discounts when pre-calculated price lists are unavailable.
Notable among the general performance and usability enhancements to the Deals app are the ability to set different default values for each delivery type and the ability to set individual defaults as overridable.
In line with Enable’s commitment to release a product update every six weeks, we have numerous new features under development that will be ready to test in your UAT environment on Thursday, September 16th. Deployment of this next set of features to your live environment will take place on Saturday, October 23rd.
Included in the next update:
If you have any questions about current or future updates, please contact us at projects@enable.com or book an appointment with a member of the Customer Success team. As always you can log a ticket with any feedback or questions you might have. We look forward to hearing from you!
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