In part 2 of this case study (see part 1 here), we’ll examine how Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia took measures to transform their trade management process to eliminate leakage and bolster their bottom line. In part 2, we explore the changes they made to restructure the commercial model with a single-source-of-truth at the root— without sacrificing the nuances required to succeed in a traditional trade landscape.
Learn more about the challenges that drove this effort in part 1: Easing the Margin Squeeze at Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia: The Challenge of Implementing Modern Strategies for Traditional Trade.
“The Perfetti partnership with UpClear and application usage of BluePlanner marked the transformation from manual management of trade promos, becoming into a system and data-based trade spend management. Using BluePlanner, the team is now empowered with standardized workflows and same data set necessary, which at the end improves data consolidation for data-based decision making for commercial teams.”
– Putu Ayu Mas Amanda Pratiwi, Trade Marketing Manager, Perfetti Van Melle Indonesia
When point fixes and sharper quarterly reviews do not close the gap, the structure itself has to change. Reinventing the commercial model with a single-source-of-truth at its root. Perfetti Van Melle partnered with UpClear to deploy BluePlanner. The team framed the move as a shift in commercial philosophy rather than a simple software rollout. The legacy model assumed that smart people with spreadsheets and enough time could reconcile any inconsistency after the fact. The new model assumed that reconciliation after the fact was itself the problem.
The structural changes above are the visible layer. Underneath them, three design principles in the BluePlanner platform are what actually connect the decisions. Each one directly addresses a failure mode, and together they explain why the rebuild produces different behavior, not just a different interface.
| Principle | What it does | Why it matters |
| Decisions in context | Pricing teams make pricing calls while viewing the full calendar of long-term agreements and short-term promotions. Trade teams plan promos against the same view. | Removes the blind spot where a base price adjustment and a trade deal are set in isolation and then quietly cancel each other out on shelf. |
| Accountability by design | Follow-up tasks and approvals are assigned across the organization, with ownership traceable end to end. | Converts “who was supposed to close this out” from a weekly email chase into a visible workflow step, which is where much post-promotion leakage is absorbed. |
| Collaboration on a shared Plan – Volume Plan, Promo Calendar, P&L | A single forecast and a single volume plan, promotion calendar, and P&L that sales, demand planning, marketing, trade and finance all work against, rather than reconciling separate versions downstream. | Eliminates the coordination friction where each function is optimizing against its own numbers. Trade-offs become visible in the moment, not in the post-mortem. |
Taken together, these three principles form the operational basis of a shared forecasting engine. Context prevents decisions from conflicting. Accountability stops decisions from drifting. A shared P&L keeps every function anchored to the same outcome. The system does not make the decisions. It makes sure the decisions are informed by the same picture.
The above design principles above sound clean in theory. What makes the Perfetti Van Melle case instructive is that the system has to apply them across two channels that behave nothing alike, at the same time, for the same brands, funded and approved out of the same budget envelope. A price change on a hero SKU in a national modern trade retail chain has implications for the distributor price into local traditional trade outlet. A consumer promotion funded for modern trade visibility has knock-on effects on price compliance across thousands of traditional trade warungs and kiosks. The system cannot treat these as separate problems, because commercially they are one problem.
This is where the “decisions in context” principle stops being a feature and starts being a requirement. A pricing team making a call for a modern trade customer needs to see, on the same screen, the long-term joint business plan commitments with that retailer, the short-term promotional calendar running in parallel, and the distributor price structure that feeds the traditional trade network. Without that, the decision is locally optimized, indefensible, and structurally wrong.
| What the system has to carry | Modern trade dimension | Traditional trade dimension |
| Pricing decision | Negotiated price ladders, promo price points, and JBP commitments visible in the planning view | Distributor price, suggested retail price, and price compliance targets flowing from the same base |
| Promotional calendar | Retailer-specific promo windows, co-funded activity, and category management commitments | Trade schemes, distributor incentives, and outlet-level activation overlaid on the same timeline |
| Trade spend budget envelope | Customer-specific accruals, contract terms and deductions tracked per chain | Scheme-level accruals across distributors, with redemption visibility the Excel era never had |
| Forecast and P&L | Volume and margin by customer, sensitive to promo lift assumptions | Volume and margin by channel and region, sensitive to distribution coverage and compliance |
| Approval and accountability | Sophisticated deal approval flows matching the complexity of the negotiation | High-volume, lightweight approval flows matching the repeatability of the execution – giving not only internal visibility but bringing “on the ground” distributors in on the plan. |
The channel design tension is real. Modern trade rewards precision, which pulls the system toward complexity. Traditional or general trade punishes complexity in execution, which pulls the system toward simplicity. A platform that satisfies only one of those pressures will fail the other. The value of a shared engine is not that it makes both channels look the same. It is that it lets each channel use the planning sophistication it needs, while keeping pricing, promotion, forecast and P&L anchored in one connected view. A decision made in one channel cannot quietly contradict a decision made in the other, because both teams are working from the same underlying numbers.
That is the orchestration job. It is also the reason an Excel-based model eventually breaks regardless of how disciplined the team is. Spreadsheets can hold either complexity or consistency, but not both, and not across two channel logics at once.
At UpClear, our mission is to empower Consumer Goods brands to maximize revenue performance and trade investment returns through intelligent, collaborative software—providing a single source of truth, streamlined automation, and actionable insights.
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