Enable Blog — Rebate Management System

If your organization has decided it’s time to upgrade your rebate management system to facilitate further growth. You’re probably excited about the prospect of finally letting go of that old legacy system, and eager to get started on implementation. This can be a great opportunity for your business but is also not a decision to take lightly. After all you don’t want the implementation project to fail. According to Geneca, about 75% of all business and IT executives anticipate that their software projects will fail while another 75% of executives believe their projects are “doomed from the start.”

Before you even start speaking with and vetting rebate management software vendors, you should first ask yourself several questions about what your organization needs and wants from this software implementation project. The answers will help you determine your plan and understand what kind of functionality your organization requires from a rebate management system.

The software marketplace offers a wide range of software products and services. It can be hard to decide on which one to choose: off-the-shelf vs bespoke? Your company’s choice of software is critical to your business’ performance and can have a major effect on your bottom line.

Off-the-shelf software is a product that is universally available with a comprehensive set of features that you pay a monthly or yearly fee to use. For example, here at Enable we have developed a rebate management SaaS (software as a service) platform which maximizes the performance of your B2B deals while improving financial transparency and operational efficiency.

Bespoke software is designed and built on demand with a specific purpose in mind for the organisation that has commissioned the build. Bespoke software solutions are always unique and specialized, they adapt to your existing business processes.

To avoid choosing the wrong solution, saving you both time and money, we take a look at the advantages and disadvantages for both bespoke and off-the-shelf software solutions, specifically when it comes to rebate management.

As you start to research and meet with rebate management vendors, your decision may not be clear on who to choose. You may find that you several rebate management solutions meet your business needs, or that you’re simply overwhelmed by the amount of information you have obtained.

That’s where a rebate management decision-making matrix comes in, eliminating so much of the confusion, subjectivity, and the inevitable back-and-forth that’s involved in decision-making. It will quantify your decision so you can select the best rebate management solution for your business.

The more effective a digital transformation is, the better the benefits gained by the business. Research by BCG shows that more than 80% of companies plan to accelerate their companies’ digital transformations, with overwhelming evidence showing that successful digital transformations drive performance and competitive advantage.

In the best of times, the rebate management process can be challenging. Navigating hundreds of agreements, suppliers and negotiations while staying compliant and simultaneously appealing to numerous stakeholders and decision makers, is not always a simple task.

Over the course of 2020, as businesses around the world learned to adjust to remote working, one thing became abundantly clear. Proper rebate management has never been more important.

In response to the pandemic, the companies that have prepared themselves to not only be more resilient and robust internally, but also able to account for future changes that will take place as supply chains are re-defined, will fare far better in the long run.

As we move towards a post pandemic world, three emerging trends shed light on why rebate management must be a top priority for organizations seeking long-term success.

Finance teams play a pivotal role in understanding the impact of deals and rebates and in guiding their organization for what comes next. However, over the past few years they have been neglected with outdated software and manual processes that consumer their time and energy. Here are key business outcomes that your finance function can achieve from implementing rebate management software.

Today, in an era that’s meant to be about finance transformation, much of the finance function still relies heavily on manual processes including spreadsheets for rebate management, you’ll find plenty of them buried in emails and on desktops. Instead of those in finance focusing on giving high-level insight, they find themselves stuck chasing down errors, reconciling data, and trying to make important decisions based on an assortment of often incomplete or inaccurate rebate data. As a result, many organisations end up with disputes with trading partners and around 4% of potential rebate revenue typically goes unclaimed. But could 2021 be the year all this changes for finance and they finally embrace automation

With 2020 coming to a close and 2021 beginning, the combination of agile short-term planning and strategic long-term forecasting is critical to the success of any company. Finance leaders should be busy making new plans and optimizing existing ones in order to stay competitive and increase revenue. It’s never too early to prepare after all!

Finance checklists are a useful tool to help you stay on course when getting ready for a successful year ahead. Gartner has laid out a set of predictions and priorities for finance teams which you can use to see how you’re measuring up. Try to keep the following points in mind when creating your own rebate management “to-do” list.

Finding: Many projects slated five years out or more are being moved closer due to lack of capabilities with current applications.

As the SaaS market continues to grow, companies are investing in more technologies than ever before. At Enable, being a leader in the rebate management space, we can see the enormous growth in businesses adopting our software, because it can revolutionize how a company calculates, accrues, and allocates its rebates - positively impacting processes for all those involved in rebate management internally and externally.

With businesses now adjusting to the new normal, a shift to remote work, fewer in-person deals being conducted, and a growing concern around maintaining compliance and security, businesses are looking for solutions to help them survive and grow through these challenging times.

Software and systems are essential part of modern-day businesses, they support and facilitate processes whilst helping your business to stay competitive and even help your teams to achieve more of their potential. Some systems even save a lot of time and money by accomplishing different tasks in minutes.