News

ClearTalk Live: How TPM works with ERP

Who this is for  

Direct: Emerging Brand Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) Sales Leaders, Sales Operations/Planning, Trade Marketing, IT 

Adjacent: Finance/Accounting, Demand Planning  

Preview 

Trade Promotion Management (TPM) is a tool for CPG HQ Sales/Trade Marketing, & Field Sales with connections to Finance/Accounting and Demand Planning.  In the field, TPM supports account planning, execution and settlement processes.  At HQ, TPM helps manage account teams & control spending.  Furthermore, it helps accounting settle deductions, and provides inputs to Finance and Demand Planning for the financial accrual and volume forecasts, respectively. 

TPM needs “fuel”: customers, products, prices, shipments, & deductions are a few examples.  This fuel can come from Quickbooks and/or be manually assembled.  But if an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has been installed, it is usually the source of this data.   

TPM’s fuel comes from a couple of categories of data. 
Master Data- TPM makes use of your customers, and products, their prices, and cost of goods. 
Actual Sales Data– Your shipments are loaded into TPM in order to provide reporting on sales performance versus plans and/or targets.  Other sales data, like distributor shipments and point of sale (POS) data can also be used, but these don’t come from ERP.  
Deductions- A key functionality and benefit of TPM is the ability to reconcile short payments.  To do this, deduction information is sourced from the Accounts Receivable module of ERP. 

TPM also produces information that can be used by other functions.  Some manufacturer choose to integrate this into their ERP platform.  
Off Invoice (OI) Price Conditions- TPM can clearly communicate OI deals.  Given access to TPM data, Customer Service can get timely, accurate, approved data on the customer, products, and timing of OI deals.  
Volume Forecast–  TPM produces a volume forecast.  This can be a valuable input to the Demand Planning function.  
Reconciled Deductions- TPM produces records that detail the customer, product, general ledger (GL) account and promotion(s) associated to deductions.  
Trade Spending Accrual- Because of the detail captured in promotions, TPM can be used to improve the accuracy of the financial forecast/accrual for trade spending. 

There are different ways ERP data can be exchanged with TPM.  The most common is the population of templates by the manufacturer.  These templates are then either uploaded to the platform via a user interface, or exchanged with your vendor using secure FTP and/or an integration platform.  As time goes on, expect to see more APIs that enable a direct exchange of data.    

Finally, creating the connection between ERP and TPM takes a combination of business team (sales, finance/accounting) and ERP/IT expertise.  Your solution partner will work with you to understand what is required at every step of the journey.  

Schedule a Demo

More Resources

Vytalogy Live on BluePlanner TPM

Vytalogy Wellness, a modern wellness company formed by merging the brands Natrol and Ja...

iHealth is Live on BluePlanner TPM 

iHealth, maker of Culturelle, AZO, Estroven, and other health and wellness brands, has ...

Nichols Plc. Picks UpClear for Trade Promotion Management  

Nichols Plc, maker of Vimto brand beverages in the United Kingdom, has chosen UpClear B...

UpClear Logo
UpClear © 2024
Privacy Policy