Business Problem
Ritter Sport is undergoing rapid growth, creating a more complex landscape in a competitive retail environment, creating the need to manage their trade spend more effectively.
Until this point, trade investment and promotion planning had been managed manually in Excel—a process that was:
- Time-consuming and prone to errors
- Difficult to scale with growing customer and SKU count.
- Lacking visibility and collaboration across teams, resulting in an inability to proactively manage performance to drive better performance
The company needed a single common tool, which integrated data sources, improved internal processes, collaboration to drive efficiency, as well as giving the business the grip and visibility to proactively drive better commercial plans and results.
UpClear’s Solution
To address these challenges, UpClear deployed BluePlanner, a flexible trade promotion management solution that enabled Ritter Sports UK to:
- Centralise trade planning for ~60 customers and ~80 SKUs.
- Gain greater control and transparency over promotional spend and volume.
- Replace fragmented, inaccurate, and unreliable spreadsheets with an accurate and timely, sole source of truth.
- Enable easier and faster cross-functional collaboration between sales and supply chain.
- Improve control and visibility of gross-to-net performance.
The deployment leveraged BluePlanner’s Select Package, a pre-configured implementation model ideal for fast, focused rollouts.
Deployment Approach
The BluePlanner deployment was completed from discovery to go-live in just six weeks—a standout achievement that highlighted the strength of both teams.
Key aspects of the deployment:
- Ritter’s internal project team played a critical role in ownership of data and active collaboration.
- Data was manually uploaded, including baseline data from SAP IBP, providing flexibility and speed.
- Set up in a way that future-proofs the platform—integration can be automated as Ritter scales further.
- Training and change management delivered in parallel to ensure user readiness by go-live.
Value to Ritter Sports UK
The BluePlanner solution delivered immediate and strategic value to Ritter Sports UK including:
- A faster and more accurate trade spend system.
- A single, accurate, best view of base and promotional volumes and associated trade spend.
- Full visibility into gross-to-net profitability and accurate LE picture
- Enabling proactive decision making to drive better trade investment ROI and Gross to Net performance
- Better collaboration between Sales and Demand Planning and a more robust S&OP process
- Positioning Ritter to evolve its trade planning capabilities with future integration and analytical capabilities, enabling them to optimise trade spend for greater ROI and revenue performance.
Want to learn more?
About UpClear
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.
BluePlanner Revenue Management software supports end-to-end processes, from Annual Operating Planning to Account Planning and Execution.
