Are you really making the most of
your account investment plans?

In an economic climate of ever increasing raw material costs, consumer caution and retailer hunger to maintain momentum for growth, you could argue that we are sat in the middle of a perfect storm. Those that manage to keep ahead of the weather front will need to run fast and to do so will need to become smarter, faster and avoid being held back by the inefficiencies that they could afford to carry in more buoyant times.

Retailers are now more sophisticated than ever when it comes to not only understanding their customers, but also understanding the contributions suppliers make towards their growth and profitability. Joint business planning has become more than just a buzz word and is a real tool that retailers use to map out their future performance. The cynics amongst us would argue it is a tool to extort more money out of suppliers playing one off against another. Whichever way you look at it, the stark reality is, the only way to win is to engage with them at a level of sophistication that matches the speed and pace at which they are moving.

If there’s ever been a time to really understand what your account investment plans deliver, then it’s now. However, traditional methods of analysing ROI on account investment planning has to date been conducted through resource hungry manual processes. The evolution of manufacturers’ capabilities has been far outpaced by the level of sophistication now expected by the retailers.

It would not surprise you to hear that over 80% of the time spent on this critical task of investment decision making is wasted on sourcing and manipulating vast amounts of data from multiple systems into fragile spreadsheets of which 90% have errors. Commercial teams are far too often left with insufficient time to fully explore their real investment options and comprehensive ‘what-if?’ analysis; inevitably resulting in sub-optimal decisions based purely on a reaction to retailer pressures and fear of the unknown.

With this recognised retailer evolution has come a new solution to this ever growing issue. A new emerging company called Profitable Change Limited have developed what they believe to be the step change that is required in the way account investment decisions are made.

The new tool called ProfitSee™ has been specifically designed to allow commercial teams to spend dramatically more time on what they should be doing, making the right decisions, fast. In a world where profit is King and pace is critical, ProfitSee™ removes the burden of dead time associated with manipulating information and allows users to build alternative investment models in minutes. Multiple scenarios can be created in a fraction of the time cumbersome spreadsheet methods take and can be compared side-by-side instantaneously in the form of an investment decision making menu of choice.

With retailer KPIs illustrated simultaneously, commercial teams can easily see the strength of these proposals from their customer’s perspective adding credibility and integrity into the entire planning and performance tracking process. This ability to prove to your customers, at a granular level, the value of your plans to them based on the quantified building blocks of your proposals is an invaluable catalyst in the development of strategic relationships with your key customers.

ProfitSee™ resolves many of our frustrations that we have all become far too accepting of as part of the job, but it’s uses as a powerful commercial decision making tool don’t end there. Having proudly been created for users by users, the tool has the ability to store these historical scenarios and compare them against actual performance, effectively acting as a performance barometer in the event that plans need to be adjusted in the future as a result of unknown or unexpected plan deviations.

All scenarios are stored centrally on a customised database and senior managers and commercial finance teams will be pleased to hear that the tool also comes complete with a structured sign-off process locking committed scenarios.

ProfitSee™ is a very clever solution to a real-world need and it boasts Microsoft Gold certified developer credentials and a helpdesk support service.

With far too many features and benefits that I can write about here, it’s certainly worth seeing it for yourself. Click here to see more about this innovative new solution. For a live demo, contact Profitable Change Limited directly on
Tel. 08455-193-685, email enquiries@profitablechange.co.uk or visit their website at www.profitablechange.co.uk

Date published: October 2011