Extending Netsuite With iTPM (Integrated Trade Promotion Management) For Consumer Goods Companies

Services Offered: Native NetSuite App Development

Industry: Consumer Goods

CG Squared

Client Overview

CG Squared, or CG2, stands for Consumer Goods Consulting Group. The CG2 team has more than 30 years of experience delivering closed-loop trade promotion management solutions and trade promotion management best practices consulting. CG2 is 100% focused on trade promotion and deduction management for the CG industry. CG2 is committed to providing its clients with world-class TPM software and support services.

Challenges

Trade spending is typically the second largest P&L item for Consumer Goods (CG) companies. Consumer Packaged Goods and fast-moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies find it challenging to manage their entire lifecycle of trade promotions efficiently. CG companies spend substantial amounts of time and money on promotional events trying to increase their sales, revenue, and market share.

Solution and Strategy

Trade Promotion Management bridges the gap between company trade spending and customer deductions. It offers a strategic way to control costs by improving visibility into trade promotion planning and execution. It also provides an easier way to process deductions. A powerful Trade Promotion Management application that seamlessly integrates with a company’s ERP or financial system would allow these companies to efficiently manage deals and customer deductions while controlling the associated costs. Without a solution like this, companies must manage trade spending outside the ERP in Excel spreadsheets.

To enable Trade Promotion Management for Consumer Goods companies on NetSuite, CG Squared, Inc. partnered with Amzur to develop a Native SuiteApp on the NetSuite Platform called iTPM. The SuiteApp enables Consumer Goods companies to manage their entire trade promotion lifecycle from start to finish, including promotion planning, deduction management, transactions, analytics, and reporting within NetSuite.

An official Native SuiteApp, iTPM, was built exclusively using the NetSuite platform.

iTPM

Deliverables

iTPM is a SuiteApp built completely within NetSuite. iTPM is built on NetSuite, so there is no “integration”. Everything already ties into the company’s critical ERP elements. Some of the key benefits of iTPM are as followed:

Appropriate visibility of trade spending by all stakeholders

Real-time data and KPIs by promotion, customer, and item, and help prevent overpays

Industry standards and best practices built into iTPM, including Promotion Planning and Deduction Management

Matching deductions to specific promotions helps prevent “double-dipping”

Methodology

The Amzur team designed and developed the SuiteApp using a technology stack of NetSuite, NetSuite One World, SuiteScript 2.0, and SDF. iTPM was built to CG Squared’s specifications with a focus on improving the user experience.

The goal was to ensure high user adoption. Amzur achieved this with an easy-to-use design that captures all critical deal information and provides visibility into the ROI from each promotional event. Multiple SDN developer accounts were used for development and separate accounts were used for testing. Testing was performed on both OneWorld and standard accounts to ensure that iTPM would work flawlessly on any NetSuite account.

iTPM was developed using a hybrid development methodology that combines the waterfall model and agile scrum methodology. This approach was useful when we had to prioritize certain features attributing to the requirements of our pilot customers and when we had to restructure the planned releases of iTPM.

Benefits

Saving time and boosting productivity

"Partnering with Amzur accelerated iTPM development by combining Amzur’s NetSuite expertise with our knowledge of trade promotion management. The result is an out-of-the-box TPM solution that does not require integration. iTPM is simply installed as a NetSuite managed bundle. iTPM eliminates the lengthy, complex, and costly integration projects required by other TPM vendor solutions."

Alex Ring
President, CG Squared

"We designed iTPM SuiteApp so our clients can manage all aspects of trade spending inside NetSuite. With iTPM, stakeholders can better plan promotions because they have appropriate visibility to promotion KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) including estimated spending, actual spending, and net liability by promotion, customer, and item. Processing deductions with iTPM saves our clients time. Just imagine trying to manage thousands of promotions and deductions in Excel. With iTPM, our clients know which bill-backs haven’t been paid or deducted yet, improving forecast accuracy."

Alex Ring
President, CG Squared

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