Negotiation is a very complex process for wholesalers because they hold an extremely large saving potential. Agreements are immensely important for achieving an expected and needed margin but also for creating customer loyalty and control of customer behavior. Furthermore, a large variety of different sources for calculation increases the negotiation complexity. Additionally, it is extremely difficult to gain overview and estimation of impacts from very creative and complex kinds of agreements.
Examples are:
Many customers are still working with manual settlement processes including massive media breaks by using different tools like Word, Excel, Access or paper and other formats. Partner dependent settlement processes are not unusual, as well as retrospective master data changes resulting from fast changing market requirements and general market changes.
An example for such market changes is that companies start to facilitate multi-/omni-channel formats. Another example is the burgeoning of new purchasing alliances of multiple traders which create new complex negotiation forms and contents.
For these complex negation results a system-supported reproducibility of different agreement types is not given, which is causing an increasing lack of transparency and an increased demand for comparability. Eroding margins have become a large problem that requires better negotiation preparation (creating best-, worse-, expected case scenarios before the negotiation) to close the lack of forecast and simulation.
With this solution, customers can visualize the impact of any deal and future profitability before their negotiators create an agreement. They can get help with enhancing and protecting their profitability, while simplifying their overall purchasing and negotiation processes, through real-time simulation and analysis. The increased visibility of margins and profitability allows wholesalers to reduce the cost of goods sold through a streamlined, closed-loop process.
By centralizing all agreements, wholesalers can make relevant information readily accessible to their buying and/or selling teams, whether they are in the office or off-site. They can also eliminate diverse information sources and manual agreement processing.
With full transparency before, during, and after a negotiation, negotiators can control the status of agreements, purchase-price development, and annual negotiation and purchase revenue targets. They can also improve their flexibility to negotiate on different organizational levels and various category and article structures.
