Why Margins Tracking
Wouldn’t it be nice to not just track your margins via financial systems in place but also get a perspective on Margins at different Micro markets, your distributors?
Margins tracking is a crucial element that can deliver amazing bargaining power to your Marketing activities and can work both ways. Either it can be used for negotiating terms with a distributor, or used for internal decisions on price setting. This gets even more pronounced with information on certain types of Margins for Competitor brands.
Margins tracking impacts the bottom line directly and with effective monitoring that takes into account changing distribution costs, Margin tracking can aid greatly in protecting margins.
Issues in Margin Tracking
Margin tracking involves issues as follows:
- Constancy: Margin tracking capabilities must be constant activity to reflect the changing realities of Market where Price movements, distribution cost changes and other market pressures cause Margins to change frequently. Only with current Margins insight can pricing, promotion and other Marketing Mix decisions be taken effectively.
- Micro Market Sensitivity: A key issue for Margins tracking is to address the problem of Managing margins relevant data, such as changing distribution costs, which involves several elements such as logistics costs, Octroi’s and miscellaneous costs applicable to specific Micro Markets. Dynamic nature of this data further compounds the complexity of Margins tracking.
- Managing Different Price types: Key attributes of margins tracking in downstream distribution chain includes ability to maintain different price types in a flexible way, and then defining margins based on calculations of custom defined price types. This requires significant customization flexibility in the system.
- Data Authorization: While Margins Data is gathered, the access control rights of the Margin data need to be controlled via the Sales Organization. Hence any system to track margins must recognize Sales Hierarchy and incorporate data level security to control access.
Our Solution
Our Solution Outreach addresses each of the points effectively as following notes will clarify.
Distribution Cost Maintenance:
- While Outreach allows you to define different price types and margin types, there is a fixed cost type for distribution cost. Outreach provides powerful features to easily define and maintain distribution cost differences to large number of POS (Points of Sale). Combined with the fact that margins are automatically calculated and maintained, Outreach provides constancy aspect of delivering margins related intelligence via numerous reports and queries.
- All distribution cost maintenance is done with Sales Organization authorizations, thus ensuring the data provided is only those who are authorized for those particular locations.
Custom Price Types and Margin Types
- While Outreach allows you to define different price types and margin types, there is a fixed cost type for distribution cost. Outreach provides powerful features to easily define and maintain distribution cost differences to large number of POS (Points of Sale). Combined with the fact that margins are automatically calculated and maintained, Outreach provides constancy aspect of delivering margins related intelligence via numerous reports and queries.
- All distribution cost maintenance is done with Sales Organization authorizations, thus ensuring the data provided is only those who are authorized for those particular locations.
Authorization
- Margin tracking follows the same principles of authroization as Price Tracking, I.e. data quality is assured via ensuring customized authorization and validation rules are enforced.