Situation

A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based American commercial enterprise focused on the retail sale of health and nutrition related products had an overly manual process for collecting vendor funds resulting in an extended lifecycle of promotions and millions of dollars of inaccurate retail vendor chargebacks.

• No clear plan about how to find the right technology partner
• Undefined workflow that resulted in ad hoc data input, exposing risk
• Lack of visibility into where any one promotion was in the lifecycle

Solution

To automate data entry and create new, scalable processes around collecting retail vendor funding, our customer needed the right technology.

• Led an RFP process end-to-end to select a software vendor that would be a strong partner
• Implemented process controls ensuring all entitled vendor funding will be received, recorded and no chargebacks missed
• Launched an internal advisory board and a product vendor advisory board to ensure enterprise-wide adoption of the new process and software

“The fact that we cut out mundane, manual processes by moving to an automated process frees us up to do what we really need to do.”- VP Financial Services

Results

BusinessForward’s tools, templates and training have allowed cross-functional teams to create, track and execute promotions easily and thoroughly, resulting in:

• 33% reduction in promotional lifecycle
• Collaborative relationships with product vendors
• 60% reduction in end to end process time through automation

“We learned things like putting a vendor advisory board in place so that we build our processes the right way, from the beginning.” – CIO

“We couldn’t have done this without BusinessForward” – VP Financial Services

“Transforming our legacy IT into efficient, easier processes really opened our eyes.” – IT leader