A dairy company’s marketing plan should feature instructions on how to accrue sums by specific criteria and how to pay these accrued amounts to one or more accounts.
If this sounds like a fairytale, it might be time to evaluate if you have the right ERP system for your dairy business.
Dairy producers who manage marketing plans (rebates, billbacks and other promotional programs) should look at their current processes and ask:
Is this outside of our current ERP system's capabilities?
Do we use lots of complex spreadsheets?
Does it take a long time to reconcile, if at all?
Are analytics on the program few or missing all together?
What does it cost to run these marketing plans, beyond the marketing plans themselves?
(The same hard questions should be asked by a dairy producer when looking at their company's sales commissions.)
A dairy producer's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system should be tracking, reporting and analyzing these marketing and commissions plans.
The system should allow for the setup of a range of sources (customers, customer groups), as narrow or broad as necessary. The ERP marketing plan should also define the items that the accrual plan will apply, as well as instructions on how accrual amounts will be calculated (by the unit or pound, a set dollar amount or a percent of margin).
Dairy producers need an ERP solution that can get them off spreadsheets and away from manual efforts, to managing these marketing plans on a system that allows for configuring and auto posting values.
When configuration tasks are complete, dairy producers can process accruals and accrual payments more efficiently and accurately.
