Price_Protection

A big problem in the channel, there are limited tools in the marketplace to support it. Here is a best practice from Oracle using Trade Management. SAP sometimes says that it has a solution and Oracle does not. Both have solutions but both require some custom work.

Oracle has a very strong channel management solution which includes distributor and reseller profiling, inventory tracking, POS data management, claims and deductions for direct and indirect customers, price protection, special pricing requests and many other channel specific business processes. I would turn the question back around at SAP and ask them what channel best practices do they have built into their MYSAP application. Our channel pricing and channel optimization are tools are best in class and recognized by our customers as excellent tools for channel management. We would appreciate an opportunity to present our solution.

Regarding the specific Price Protection question presented by SAP, here is our official response. In our Pricing tool, we maintain all contract pricing (permanent and temporary) for direct customers. Indirect customer special pricing programs and rebate programs are also maintained in the same pricing engine. With price protection, a change to a master price at the product family or SKU level for a customer or group of customers would initiate a program that checks contract terms for each channel partner and then checks for remaining channel partner inventories. These inventories initiate an on account credit that is created, approved, and settled. The credit is generated from an offer that is created to account for the increase or decrease in price. The offer's rules are such that a credit is auto-generated and then an auto-pay trigger is initiated. The channel partners receives an email notification about this price protection and the corresponding credit memo. This information can also be viewed on their portal through our self-service tool. All transactions roll-up to a reporting too to gage liabilities and expenditures by territory, by customer, by SKU, and by product family. Other criteria can be used, but these are the most common.