Supplier Scheme Management Application

Background

Founded in 1963, customer is the fourth largest retailer in the world with operations in 34 countries and global revenues of more than 30 Billion Dollars. Headquartered in Dusseldorf, Germany, the customer is a global leader in self-service and business-to-business wholesale. The company operates more than 28 wholesale distribution centers and more than 2000 suppliers in India.

Challenges

The supplier scheme and discount management activities for each month were done manually in Excel Sheets. This was highly inefficient and laborious task because it included item level negotiations and discount / sales tracking for multiple suppliers across multiple regions.

Monthly schemes had to be derived and applied for more than 2000 suppliers on more than 100,000 products. Before beginning of the month, negotiations with suppliers (on discounts applicable based on product sale) were done over emails / phone-calls. Finalized scheme data gets updated in Excel sheets and shared with respective supplier.

At the end of the month, the sales volumes are downloaded from ERP (SAP) and these were compared against the schemes for 100,000+ products. This was a highly strenuous and repetitive activity.

Challenges:

• Massive manual efforts spent for retro amount calculations. Lots of rework because of errors encountered due to huge product / supplier volumes.
• No visibility on scheme profitability, buyer performance & effectiveness of negotiations.
• No visibility on performance of individual stores.
• Delayed, and in many cases, incorrect supplier retro payment.

Substantial amount of efforts and money was getting lost in tracking monthly supplier schemes!

Solution

The supplier scheme management application was developed and delivered on the platform to track and manage supplier scheme and discount records for each month. The application provided a digital solution for suppliers to track their scheme details as well as daily sales volumes.

Result

• Integrated end-to-end digital solution for efficient tracking of supplier schemes and discounts.
• Huge reduction in the operational efforts and costs.
• Much needed visibility on scheme data at a product / supplier / store / region level.