With rising prices caused by supply chain shortages and political unrest, maintaining profitable margins has become an increasingly difficult challenge. One way that retailers can mitigate unnecessary costs is by successfully managing and controlling vendor funds. The solutions we’ve created in partnership with SAP are designed to simplify the agreement lifecycle process and help retailers boost their profits, regardless of the state of the industry.
On June 29, 2022, we hosted a webinar to teach retailers how to optimize their vendor fund agreement process. Peter Schulz, customer value manager, gicom, Bruce Sholes, global solutions director, SAP and Sarah Wilhelm customer value manager, gicom spoke to attendees about the business challenges, opportunities and benefits of and SAP S/4HANA Cloud for agreement profitability and negotiation by gicom, PE . Let’s recap.
Promotions are key in times of growing retail business challenges
Every year, retailers must negotiate millions of dollars’ worth of agreements to offer the promotions consumers expect. Going into vendor discussions underprepared leads to weak negotiation positions.
And, once signed, the ongoing agreement lifecycle management process is no easy task either. When handled manually, the management process leads to avoidable errors and missed opportunities for unclaimed retail profit.
What’s more, these problems are exacerbated by ongoing supply chain complications globally. Retailers have less room to negotiate when margins are already stretched thin. Today, the importance of a streamlined and optimized vendor funds discussion cannot be understated.
Optimizing promotion management by turning to gicom and SAP
During the webinar, gicom and SAP discussed how we offer solutions to these business challenges – a 360-degree view of the end-to-end agreement lifecycle process, with full visibility for both parties. With SAP PMR and SAP S/4HANA Cloud for agreement profitability and negotiation by gicom, PE retail businesses can digitize and control the entire vendor fund agreement management process.
These tools strategically improve supplier relationships by:
- Defining the best negotiation strategy
- Forecasting, planning and simulating all potential and actual agreements
- Calculating margin analysis to manage profitability on all levels in real time
- Gaining a clear, concise view of KPIs for both business partners
- Ensuring a single source of truth by digitizing of all agreements and terms, including settlements, and posting on shared SAP
- Driving revenue growth for both parties
Improving vendor funds and agreement management
SAP and gicom successfully proved in this latest webinar, how retailers can include upcoming promotions in their negotiations to ensure profitability is maintained with an enhanced vendor fund agreement management process.
This is done by first utilizing gicom’s agreement documentation solution to conduct all vendor fund discussions. Next, the agreement information is transferred to SAP’s PMR tool, which allows retailers to see the impact of offering customers a deal like buy-one-get-one-free or a 20% off coupon.
The promotion planning and execution both take place within SAP PMR, creating one easy-to-access hub for promotion management. Finally, gicom’s real-time margin solution is activated to ensure a smooth invoice process and a successful settlement of agreements.
During the webinar, viewers got to see gicom’s real-time margin calculator in action. The tool can power needed insights for additional condition contract management, settlement management and procurement, sales and distribution deals. The real-time margin calculator includes a budget monitoring tool, which monitors consumption of budgets within agreement documentations for the current business year.
Boosting profits with gicom and SAP
Webinar viewers learned how gicom and SAP help retailers master their agreement management and margin optimization. By digitizing the process, retailers greatly improve transparency and gain greater control over their vendor fund management. This highly integrated end-to-end process is expertly designed to help retail businesses locate cost-saving opportunities and improve vendor relationships.
To learn more about how gicom and SAP can help you boost your profits, reach out to us today for a personal demo! And be sure to follow us on LinkedIn for updates on our upcoming webinars.