Promotional Evaluation, Budgeting

Business outcomes

At the end of the trade promotion lifecycle, Promax gives companies a clear picture of the impact of trade promotion strategy on customer profitability and bottom line results.

It aggregates enterprise-wide data to provide a definitive measure of the accuracy of the initial Outcome Modelling process. This allows management to evaluate the effectiveness of their programs, giving them actionable insights for the next planning cycle.

At the corporate level, it gives company executives the business intelligence they need to establish precise, attainable goals for the future.

Executive Intelligence

With inbuilt OLAP Technology and Data Warehousing capabilities, Promax Analytics gives company executives a clear insight into their business.

This includes important strategic metrics relating to customer profitability, operational effectiveness, channel performance and return on trade spend investment.

This information can be integrated with corporate data in enterprise systems, providing a comprehensive picture of the business as a whole and assisting executives to establish attainable corporate goals for future business cycles.

Interactive Collaboration

When promotions are planned, sales and marketing need to inform the supply chain to ensure that manufacturing produces the anticipated lift amount. Likewise, when the promotion is executed, the supply chain needs to be involved in making sure that the promoted products are at the appropriate locations at the right time. After the promotion is finished, the actual results need to be fed back into sales and marketing for the next round of planning. These internal integrations are crucial to the success of a promotion. Promax closes the loop with other internal teams like production and the supply chain to drive continuous improvement in the execution of promotions leading to greater customer satisfaction and greater promotional effectiveness.

Promax is designed specifically to promote collaborative Promotion Planning and Trade Spend Management across the business enterprise – as well as with external stakeholders such as customers and supply chain partners.

• Facilitates coordination and synchronisation of promotions across the entire organization including Sales, Marketing, Finance and the Supply Chain
• Provides transparent view of the promotions program internally and across the entire value chain
• Better visibility reduces overspend from the outset and optimises the business plan

Sales Budgeting

Sales Budgeting in Promax supports more accurate planning by coordinating and synchronising Business Planning with Promotional Planning and execution.

This allows the organisation to operate from a single game plan thereby increasing efficiency in the preparation, approval and execution of the budgets. As promotions are planned and executed, Promax automatically updates the forecast to reflect all activities. It can be compared with budget or optionally used to update a budget provision.

Promax Sales Budgeting allows users to:

• create Sales Budgets at any level, i.e. State, National level
• pro-rate National Sales Budget to State and Channel, or via National Accounts
• create Customer level budgets by item
• utilise Top Down/Bottom Up budgeting

Sales Performance

Promax tracks and reports actual results against each promotion. Once a promotion is confirmed its details are preserved as ‘planned values’. Actual sales can then be recorded against the promotion to provide a detailed understanding of performance. This includes volume and financial results.

Promax allows all promotions to be kept on file for as long as needed. Thus it is quite feasible to keep two or three years detailed history, product by product. While an account manager is likely to be interested in the results of specific promotions, it is often valuable for a company to review at a far higher level the results of the trade spend. Promax has numerous reports designed to summarise at a high level, plus drill down into the detail.

In-Store Compliance

An important factor in reconciling the results of promotions is the ability to assess in-store compliance with tactical, retail activity designed to support the promotion.

To measure the true impact of trade spend, managers will want answers to questions such as:

• Was the product priced in accordance with the promotional offer?
• Was the product ranged as required and were there sufficient stock levels for the promotional period?
• Did the facings and displays comply with the promotional planograms?
• Were in-store materials such as posters, shelf-talkers and point-of-sale items displayed for the duration of the promotion?

Promax allows companies to integrate their promotion planning and management systems with field operations solutions running on handheld or laptop computing devices.

These solutions allow field sales and marketing representatives, or contracted merchandising companies, to gather in-store compliance information and communicate the data back to management on a daily basis.

The information can then be analysed alongside promotional forecasts and scan data to give management both a quantitative and qualitative understanding of which promotions are working, in which accounts, and which ones are not.

Operational Metrics

Promax also allows companies to reconcile a broad range of operational performance metrics across the business, including sales performance, in-store compliance, accruals and claims, deductions and payments and supply chain operations (as they relate to Trade Spend management).

Post Plan Validation

Promax not only provides analysis and management of each detailed promotion it will also enable users to evaluate the entire promotional program by customer. This provides a very powerful analysis of return on investment via a range of parameters such as customer, brand, category or region. Promax reporting can mix planned and actual period data to predict end of year results literally as you end promotions. This gives an up-to-the-minute view of product profitability by customer as results arrive or new plans are created.

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