Naylor Industries Turning Rebates into an Opportunity for Growth
The Customer
130-year-old Naylor Drainage is a family-owned UK manufacturing company headquartered in South Yorkshire with a global reach. They manufacture drainage and ducting systems, specialized clay pipes, concrete, and environmental products for the construction industry.
“In the building materials industry, rebates are a given,” Georgina Hopkinson, Business Coordinator explains. “They’re great for building relationships with customers—everybody does it.” She emphasizes the value of incentive rebates as well, noting that they “give customers the option to push and grow.”
However, Hopkinson also acknowledges potential risks, stating that “because it’s kind of a given, [rebates] sometimes can get a bit out of hand.” To address this, she advises having “a platform like Enable to manage that through” to ensure clarity. “It’s really about knowing what agreements you’ve got in place for your customers,” she concludes.
Building Mutually Beneficial Agreements
In total, Naylor manages between 15-25 agreements. “Sometimes we’ll offer rebates to help build relationships, whether it’s with specific branches or for particular projects we want to work on,” Hopkinson explains. “The flexibility to create agreements that align with these goals is key.” She emphasizes the importance of using this approach to “support a mutually beneficial agreement with the customer.”
Stripping Back the Complexity of Rebates
“Our rebate agreements are very simple—we’ve really stripped it back just for ease and fairness,” Hopkinson explains. “A lot of ours are actually a fixed percentage for a few of our buying groups. For our larger customers, we also offer rebate incentives, manage promotional funds, and work on joint initiatives like events, tools, branding. It’s something we offer pretty much across the board.”
She adds that simplifying their approach has addressed challenges they faced with reporting: “We used to exclude product groups, but as we’ve gone along, we noticed it became harder and harder to report within our other systems. Simplifying things has made it easier for customers too, giving them a bit more incentive to buy the product. So, it’s a win-win for making everything simpler.”
The Challenges
Inaccurate Data Due to Spreadsheet Usage
Prior to using Enable, Naylor used spreadsheets to manage their rebate programs. Because their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software didn’t manage rebates, this was an incredibly taxing, manual process.
Hopkinson shares, “Spreadsheets were heavily manual, and they were only updated once a month at month-end, so you couldn’t see real-time data.” She explains that this approach wasn’t always accurate because “…we were downloading databases and using spreadsheet formulas handled by our finance team, who didn’t really understand the rebate agreements we had set up.” As a result, “[t]hey’d miss things out or include things that shouldn’t have been included,” leading to inaccuracies in the data.
Accruing Rebate at the Correct Percentage
Hopkinson notes another critical issue: “If that data wasn’t manually reviewed regularly, we wouldn’t have accrued at the correct percentage. Sometimes, a customer would enter a new turnover tier, and we’d need to accrue more, but it would slip through the cracks.” She highlights how this could be especially damaging: “By the time it got to December, our worst month for trading, we’d be trying to play catch-up, which wasn’t beneficial. On the whole, the accrual process was flawed and lacking.”
Lack Of Clarity Internally
Hopkinson reflects on the internal challenges: “If finance weren’t aware of the rebates per se, and if they didn’t know about them, they wouldn’t ask, and they’d just maybe roll over last year’s agreement.” She emphasizes that internally, the lack of clarity around rebate agreements was a significant issue.
Customer Submissions
Sales looks after the paperwork side of rebate management and ensures everything Hopkins communicates with the customer is correct. Despite this, Hopkinson highlights a specific struggle related to customer submissions: “I have to submit the sales to customers every month to show how they are progressing, but that was lacking due to incoherent data. The visibility just wasn’t there.” This lack of transparency made it difficult to provide Naylor’s customers with accurate, up-to-date information.
The Solution
Amazing Level of Support
“The support and onboarding from Enable has been amazing,” Hopkinson says, reflecting on her experience with the platform. “The team was always there for us. I’d have weekly catch-up calls, and they were always at my beck and call if I needed help with emails. Even now, I have my quarterly QBR with my CSM, and if I ever need anything, I can always reach out.”
Hopkinson notes a key difference in the level of support: “The support within Enable is fantastic. They’re very hands-on as a business, and I think about how this is the only platform I manage that doesn’t sit under our IT department. When I speak to our other software and systems teams, we don’t have that same level of interaction with other businesses. It’s refreshing.”
She concludes, “I know that if I ever needed to start from scratch or wanted to completely change the way we did things, I’d be able to contact Enable, and they’d get the relevant people in a room and talk it out.”
Full Working Day To A Few Hours
Before Enable, it would’ve taken a full workday (8 hours on average) for one person to manage the spreadsheet. Hopkinson explains, “It was getting to the point where another person would review it, so that added another person’s time afterwards.” She contrasts this with the improvements brought by the Enable platform, noting, “Now, it’s an ongoing in-month process, and we get weekly updates. The Enable platform works on weekly posting invoices, so it’s a much more accurate process.”
This shift has made a significant impact on month-end procedures. “When it comes to month-end and we have to post the accruals, it only takes me a few hours now to run off the reports and make sure everything’s correct. What takes the time now is putting the payments on, which I do all in one sitting,” Hopkinson adds. “If I didn’t do it all at once, it would probably be a half-hour job. So yeah, it’s really benefited us.”
Having Confidence in the Data and Figures
“Enable is great for seeing the live data,” Hopkinson says. “A lot of the time, upper management and directors want to know where we’re at, and now we can categorically say, ‘This is where we’re at.’ We’re not waiting for a spreadsheet to be done at month-end.”
She emphasizes the increased trust in the platform: “We can confidently trust the figures, and I think it eases the rest of the sales team’s mind. For so many years, we had issues with mismatched amounts of money, but now, it’s very much like we trust what the Enable platform is spitting out because we’re inputting the data correctly.”
Hopkinson reflects on the relief the Enable platform has brought: “It’s taken off a lot of the burden. What used to be a problem is no longer an issue. Enable runs smoothly, and I’m really happy with it. It ticks over, and to me, that’s all you want out of a good working rebate management platform.”
Dealing with Disputes
“We’d have a lot of disputes,” Hopkinson admits. “A lot of it came down to the inaccurate data from the spreadsheets. The customers couldn’t align with what we had.” Although disputes still occur, she acknowledges the improvements with the Enable platform: “I’ve got one in my inbox at the moment, but with Enable I can categorically sit there and say that data is right.”
She explains how the platform’s implementation has helped: “We put the time into making sure that Enable feeds off our information correctly. Before, we had manual formulas over-typing formulas where you’d just miss things.” With the new platform, Hopkinson now has more confidence in the data: “Now I can just go back through, download a report, and say, ‘This is why our figures don’t align. Have a look at your data, please.’”
In summary, she reflects on the shift: “There were definitely challenges before, having to go through and look at our data and make sure the customer would agree with it.” But the Enable platform has streamlined that process, providing clearer, more reliable data.
Using Collaborator to Sign Off Agreements
“We’re at the point now where I’m in the collaborator platform creating the new agreements. I sit with the rest of the sales team, and we go through each agreement. Then, we use the collaborator platform to send the agreement to our customers for review. We sometimes make changes outside of the platform and then come back into the platform to finish the workflow signing process,” says Hopkinson.
Although Naylor isn’t using the collaborator platform to its fullest potential due to customers having their own process of signing contracts, Hopkinson acknowledges its effectiveness: “We don’t use it to the fullest extent that we could, but the process works for us, and it’s still a lot more streamlined than what we were doing previously.”
Accessing Timely Information
Instead of spending long hours crunching numbers for customers, the Naylor team can give customers as well as internal stakeholders information about the deals far more quickly than before.
Hannah Dempsey, Trading Manager, says, “I can see all our deals at once within Enable and the total value that we’re accruing at. This means we can turn information around quickly. Getting information to our customers used to take so long that additional invoices would come in while we were working, setting us back to zero.”
She continues, “Now, we have the numbers immediately and don’t have to spend time looking at and analyzing numbers. We can just turn that information around.”
With better turnaround times and smoother communication, Naylor is noticing an improvement in their communications with their customers as well as internal stakeholders.
Keeping Track of Unallocated Payments
“The finance app is really good for when we have something in the pipeline. We’ve set it up so we can do provisional unallocated payments, which helps me keep track.” Hopkinson explains how this process works: “Sometimes, you’ll commit to something in January, but you won’t see an invoice until October, and by then, you’ve probably already received different invoices. The provisional unallocated payments feature really helps with that.”
Hopkinson appreciates the transparency the Enable platform provides: “It’s really good for being transparent, so I can see everything clearly without losing track of where we are in the process.”
Strategic Rebate Management
“2024 is the first full year we’ve managed all our rebate agreements through Enable,” Hopkinson explains. “This is the first year I’ve been able to sit down and really look at the data.” Reflecting on the improvements, he adds, “I probably didn’t realize it at the time, but now thinking back to our review meeting at the end of last year, I was able to just download a report, look at the customer’s turnover, and have all the agreements in front of me.”
Hopkinson contrasts this new approach with the old way of doing things: “It was so simple to go, ‘The customer hit that turnover here,’ and we were able to discuss it much easier than a 30-page spreadsheet we would’ve had previously. I’d have had to go in and do so much more prep for the meeting just to make sure I had everything.” She continues, “With Enable, it was so simple. So I’d definitely say it supports strategic rebate management because we can easily look at the data and ask what next?”
A Roadmap to Business Growth
Every business wants to grow. Rebates offer a tremendous growth opportunity for those businesses utilizing them. However, when Naylor spent all their time updating spreadsheets, they weren’t generating value for their business or their customers’ businesses. That’s why it was important to have a rebate management platform that streamlines analysis and turns rebates into an opportunity for growth.
“Enable will save you so much time in the analysis, freeing up opportunities for your business to grow and develop with your customers. With Enable, we’re asking what more can we do? What rebate deals can we put in place to support customers so that we grow together? We’re excited to use rebates to promote products to our merchants.”
Hannah Dempsey | Market Analyst
Takeaways
- Naylor Industries has experienced efficiency gains due to the automation provided by Enable. The finance team no longer needs to spend excessive time on manual calculations, leading to improved productivity.
- The ability to see all deals at once and the automation of calculations have significantly reduced the time it takes to communicate rebate information to customers. This has improved customer satisfaction and prevented delays in processing.
- Enable has allowed Naylor to view rebates not just as a financial transaction but as a strategic tool for business growth.
100%
accuracy
8
manufacturing sites
130
years in business
‘Milner comments, “The support we've received from Enable has been exceptionally impressive. There were occasions when we required accelerated assistance and Enable was there to support us promptly. Their humble and adaptable approach, working at our pace during challenging times, was greatly appreciated. All in all, I couldn't have asked for more, and Enable's support has been truly fantastic.’
Alan Milner Commercial Director
‘The introduction of Enable's platform marked a pivotal change for us. It enabled us to break away from the one-size-fits-all rebate strategy and begin tailoring our programs to better suit specific customer segments and product categories. This shift in strategy has only recently begun to show its full potential, particularly over the past three months.’
Steven Carlson Vice President of Professional Dealer Sales
‘Enable has got an excellent support offering that gave us the peace of mind that our data was secure, that calculations were accurate, and nothing was going to be missed.’
Piers Windsor Group Systems Manager
‘Hyre believes the most compelling reason to consider Enable is that shared desire to be the kind of customer you value dealing with – the ones who plan ahead, provide accurate orders, pay bills on time and are ready at the job site. He explains, “With Enable, we can extend this reliability to our trade partners and vendors. It enables us to be a dependable customer, meeting tiered programs, maintaining accurate data, and ensuring appropriate challenges when needed. Vendors appreciate that if we question something, it's done with precision, avoiding unnecessary time-wasting disputes. The goal is to be the shining gold star customer for our vendors, and Enable plays a pivotal role in achieving that.’
Scott Hyre Purchasing Manager/ Manager Special Projects
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