TRADEONE DEDUCTION CLEARING SYSTEM AND WEB-ENABLED PLANNING STREAMLINES SALES FORCE WORKLOAD

Situation
Pharmaceutical marketing, finance, and sales teams were having problems staying within budget for MDF funds. The confusion surrounding this unstructured program resulted in slow claim settlement which in turn resulted in frequent customer invoice deductions. Researching and clearing these deductions was putting a very heavy burdening the finance department. The laptop systems used by sales force were problematic and synchronization and balance reconciliation issues flourished. What little reporting was available was inaccurate and poor in content, making ROI analysis impossible.

Action
Phase 1: Engaged TradeOne to conduct a discovery of their existing process. This process included interviews with customers, sales, finance and marketing. The results: Marketing desired better metrics to track utilization an ROI for dollars spent; Finance wanted better control over budgeting, Sales wanted a reliable easy to use system that freed up there time to focus on selling. Customers wanted timely payment of their promotional invoices.

Phase 2: TradeOne developed a series of proposed system design enhancements, which were presented and discussed during on-site meetings. Key goals were the replacement of laptop systems with web-based applications for planning, budgeting, reporting and claim settlement functions. The issue of invoice deductions was addressed with the integration of data feeds into the claim settlement process.

Phase 3: Setup data feeds for synchronization of deduction item information and claim settlement credits between transaction systems with TradeOne and finance systems with client.

Phase 4: TradeOne developed web-based system for easy access to all required applications, with real-time access to transactions. Enhancements included a streamlined planning tool, analytical reports, enhanced hierarchical budgeting system; on-line claim settlement and an integrated deduction matching and clearing tool.

Phase 5: TradeOne provided field training to ensure a seamless transition to the new system.

Results
Client customers realized a vast improvement in claim settlement cycle time with on-line claiming. The sales team realized a more than 50% reduction in their time spent managing customer MDF funds. The enhanced reports provided useful prior year customer MDF history as a basis for future account planning, and for performing analytics of promotional activities with sales figures. The finance department realized huge cost savings through the implementation of a central budgeting system with tight financial controls effectively eliminating the overspending problems. Time spent clearing outstanding customer invoice deductions dropped significantly with quicker claim settlement, and the addition of the deduction management system.