Managing Customer Goals with TPM
Managing Growth Your mission used to be getting on the shelf and driving trial. Whil...
This video is high-level information intended for people in the following Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) functions:
Duration: 23 minutes
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 validate and categorize 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 systems like QuickBooks, manually assembled spreadsheets, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems- our focus in this piece.
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 manufacturers 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 multiple ways ERP data can be exchanged with TPM. Because of the variety of data elements, it is usually a combination of methods, and this changes over time as needs change. Methods include manual population of templates and uploading/downloading process, creation of flat file interfaces that enable the automatic exchange of data via SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), and on-demand data exchange via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)
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.
UpClear makes software used by Consumer Goods brands to improve the management of sales & trade spending. Its BluePlanner platform is an integrated solution supporting Trade Promotion Management, Trade Promotion Optimization, Integrated Business Planning, and Revenue Growth Management.
