Flintfox leverages Microsoft Dynamics CRM to offer fully integrated Trade Promotions Management and CRM
Denver, CO (PRWEB) February 12, 2014 -- Leading Trade Promotions Management (TPM) provider, Flintfox, today announced that its modular, ERP-agnostic, TPM solution is now available as a fully integrated solution inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Flintfox provides TPM solutions that enable its customers to dramatically reduce the costs and increase the effectiveness of their trade promotions activity and increase speed-to-market. Mike Ridgway, Flintfox's CEO, says managing trade promotions can represent the second largest expense item for many manufacturers and is often notoriously difficult to manage and measure effectively.
"For many manufacturers managing their TPM activity efficiently and cost-effectively means the difference between being profitable or making a loss," he says.
"We’ve built our success on making it easy for our customers to integrate their TPM with whatever ERP system they use, so that their trade promotion activity is tightly aligned with their supply chain and expense planning and management. Now we’re providing tight integration with that other key repository of critical business data – the corporate CRM system – by allowing customers to access their TPM from right inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM itself, or via the CRM for Outlook plugin."
"Making it available inside the tool that sales teams, sales managers, marketing teams and everyone use every day means it’s easy to access and easy to use," says Ridgway. "It allows us to provide all this functionality in a user-interface that everyone understands – because it’s Outlook. So all the tools and information that those involved in the management of trade promotions need are at their fingertips – customer information, email communications, ERP data and so on.."
Ryan Robichaud, Director CRM Operations at Flintfox, says customer feedback on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM version of Flintfox TPM has been extremely positive. "Customers are really excited that they can do all their TPM-related activities such as building trade agreements, viewing promotional calendars, volume planning and forecasting, accruals management, and managing claims and deductions right from inside the Outlook interface they’re used to."
"We kept it quiet for a while, because every customer we mentioned it to wanted it yesterday," Robichaud says, "and we wanted to make sure that we had time to build a great product and be ready for the pent-up demand for this tight integration between TPM and CRM."
"Actually we've really created a new category – Trade Relationship Management – with this release,” says Robichaud, “though we don’t really need yet another acronym," he jokes.
Flintfox's Trade Promotion Management solutions allow its customers to:
- Achieve more profitable trade promotion plans
- Make better decisions about trade spending options
- Compare forecasts and trade plans for maximum potential effect on sales
- Gain real-time visibility into trade expense commitments
- Empower salespeople to quickly and easily create promotional plans and forecasts
- Forecast the impact of trade promotion "scenarios" on revenue and profitability
- Easily reconcile claims and deductions against approved trade agreements
- Forecast volume at any level of an organization hierarchy (product, product group, customer and customer group)
- Know which promotions are performing as planned and fine tune any that aren't
- See up-to-date accruals posted against the correct GL account
- Enable full auditability and reconciliation of accruals and payments
Robichaud says Flintfox's TRM for Consumer Goods is available now, and companies wanting to find out more about it can visit http://www.flintfox.com/trm
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About Flintfox International Limited
Flintfox is the Microsoft Global Independent Software Vendor for Trade Promotion management solution integrated to Dynamics AX, NAV and CRM (http://www.flintfox.com).
Flintfox's trade spend and fund management software addresses business challenges with complex pricing, trade promotions, trade rebates and deduction settlement, commonly required for companies manufacturing and distributing consumer packaged and durable goods. In addition Flintfox also provide more specialist solutions required for contracts management, chargebacks and price protection for those operating in arenas as diverse as Food Service, Liquor distribution, Consumer electronics, Industrial wholesale, Chemicals and Mining, to name a few.
Ryan Robichaud, Flintfox International Limited, http://www.flintfox.com, 1-303-593-0833, [email protected]
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