Dynamics NAV Promotions

Promotions and other related trade activities are managed from right within Dynamics NAV using the TPM menu provided by Flintfox’s advanced trade solution.

Challenges

Most companies executing promotional activities in their trade channels face challenges monitoring the activities associated with these events.

As ERP solutions mostly do not include functionality to properly manage and control promotions, so users typically develop their own solutions, most often using spreadsheets. However when using external solutions for this trade promotion management (TPM), many issues arise from the lack of real-time integration.

For example, pricing accuracy at Sales Order Entry suffers from Off-Invoice promotion amounts not being immediately available at the time of promotion confirmation, or when any changes are made. Also, without integration the accrual process cannot be automated, and therefore commitments are not expensed and represented in the general ledger in a timely manner. This means that it is not possible to accurately know the organization’s commitments at the earliest possible moment. In addition, knowing the difference between commitments and payments made, becomes a major administrative task, which is often neglected rather than tracked.

Traditionally, many companies conduct planning of promotions and negotiation of deals at regular periods in the year, but are left “blind” when those promotions are in market. Visibility to actual sales performance, consumption of accrual-based funds and budgets, and comparative analysis against competitors is often limited, if not absent, during the promotional period. Accurate information becomes available only during the post-promotion period, often three to four months after the promotional events. Given the significant cost of revenue allocations made for trade spend, accurately monitoring open financial commitments at any time is simply good business practice. Yet many companies struggle to track this information monthly, often pulling information from multiple systems and spreadsheets.

Flintfox trade promotions for Dynamics NAV integrates the management of all processes related to promotions - such as pricing, accruals and settlement of deductions - into Dynamics NAV itself, all accessed using the NAV menu.

Features

• Individual or groupings of customers and items can be included, or excluded, from promotions, for a date range if required
• One or more of over 40 promotional component types can be specified, such as rate based off-invoice ($ or %), billbacks, scanbacks, lumpsum $s, BOGOF (buy one get one free) etc.
• Users can define promotion and contract attributes for both customers and items
• Accurate automated accrual fund balance netting against all related shipments, orders, and store-level consumption - including lump-sums
• Continual monitoring of in market promotion effectiveness based on target goals and transactional sales information
• Real-time exception management related to transaction mismatches such as off-invoice adjustments that do not match promotion agreement terms
• Dynamic pricing management to adjust or respond to exceptions as they occur
• Automated order pricing and invoice settlement processing
• Deductions and claims may be reviewed, validated with ease - for both deductions and claims
• Necessary journals, debit notes, credit notes and vouchers automatically created for validated deductions, rejected deductions and payment of claims
• Role-based workflow and exception management from the broker and account managers through sales operations and finance

Benefits

• Comprehensive trade promotional events can be planned (including price adjustments, ad placement, and display support) to suit particular strategies
• Improved trade fund budget control, reducing spend variance
• Improve employee productivity related to sales operations, trade fund management, and financial settlement
• Proactively monitor and identify transaction errors or exceptions as they occur, reducing total liabilities and related impacts
• Reduced open deduction liabilities and reduced dispute resolution times 
• Improve customer service and collaboration in major accounts with shared monitoring and exception management activities during the promotion period
• Increase response time to trade promotion performance from months to days