Channel Management

The Channel Management capability helps you handle special discounts for a fixed period agreed with a customer. Transactions for the given period are typically recorded by your customer who sends you at the end of the period a spread sheet with the transactions and the claimed discount. Using Channel Management, you can quickly process the file, verify the claimed amount and pay the agreed discount back to the customer.

Claims (also called chargebacks, bill backs, or ship and debit) occur when a manufacturer authorizes a special pricing agreement with a distributor after a sale and invoice have been issued. Distributors may then offer their own special prices to retailers and must submit proof-of-sales to receive manufacturer credit based on the approved pricing.

The process faces two major challenges:

Manufacturers must manually manage thousands of special pricing agreements.
Distributors handle numerous agreements across multiple manufacturers and customers, making it difficult to calculate net costs and profits.

Channel Management addresses these issues by automating the processing and validation of distributor claims and integrating with ERP systems to automatically access accurate pricing data.

Typical Business Scenarios

Inaccurate, manual, off-line claims validations performed in legacy systems (XLS)
Prolonged unresolved claims periods
Lack of supporting detail for disputes (proof of sales/invoices)
Duplicate line items and overclaiming (ERP)
Inability to forecast and evaluate the success of programs
Unable to handle contracts with GPOs (buying groups)
Unable to handle admin fees to brokers
Inability to use MDF (marketing) lump-sum & event-based (no SKU)
Inability to create payout schedules
No scrubbing or validation of claims

Key Capabilities

Channel Management allows you to:

Upload claim items from the customer/distributor to a claim form in Pricefx.
Perform automatic validation of uploaded items against data in Pricefx.
Approve or deny individual items manually.
Create credit memos (Claim Records) based on approved items – only selected items or all items.
Maintain multiple claim templates (called Claim Types).
Retrieve the transactional data from an integrated external system (instead of an Excel file).

Getting Started with Claims Management

Pricefx offers predefined algorithm logic to perform the claim validations. You need to have in place the following requirements:

Historical data for the effectiveness of previous contracts/customers/products
Claim templates (file/format)
Claim logic - customized validations (if required)
Contract setup
Sales orders/invoice information to forecast accrual/expected payouts
Approval workflows for validation notifications/resubmissions
Payout scheduling

Channel Management Overview

Channel Management capability relies on several components that will help you smooth out your claim processes.

Claim Types

Claim types address different claiming conditions with specific fields or rules. You can have as many claim types as your business requires and each claim type has associated a claim validation logic or formula.

Claims

The Claims functionality allows you to create, manage, track and display all your claim validations. It offers a view of the claim status, progress, and approval results. You can export/share your claim results with customers, distributors, and business partners.

Claim Records

Claim records are created for each validated claim upon its approval. This list will represent the approved and validated claim records ready for the accounting process in your ERP system.