You sell to distributors who then sell to indirect retailers. Retailers may be supplied by one or more different sources.
When your customer is a distributor that then sells to indirect retailers, BluePlanner has extensive capabilities to support sales planning and trade spend management. Each retailer’s customer record identifies their source (or sources) of supply. In volume planning, this is used to deliver reporting and planning that clearly shows and rolls-up volumes planned at the retailer level in relation to the distributor that is the source of supply. In addition to importing actual sell-in (shipments) to the direct customer and actual sell-out (point of sale) at the retailer, BluePlanner can also import distributor depletion data; sale from the distributor to the retailer. Finally, when distributor shipment data is not available, UpClear Data Services can create this slice of data using your shipments to the distributor and an allocation methodology to create indirect customer data.
Distributor upcharges are incorporated into pricing, and the “Payments” module is used to align promotion spending deducted by the distributor to the indirect customer(s) where the funds are spent.
