Solving the Channel Visibility Dilemma

In the $1 trillion per year high-tech sales channel, poor visibility into partner sell-through activity can lead to costly mistakes in channel operations, revenue recognition, incentive payments, and more. To solve this problem, OEMs must address the root causes of poor data quality. Below are some questions that illustrate the problem:

• What were our channel sales in the UK last week?
• Do we have enough inventory at our largest retailer to make it through the back-to-school period?
• Who are our most effective resellers?

Many high-tech companies don’t have the answers to these questions at their fingertips. The answers depend on receiving timely, accurate sales and inventory data from channel partners, and that data is hard to come by. This is what Zyme calls the “channel data integrity problem.” Channel data integrity issues affect a company’s revenues, profits, and efficiency by obscuring its insights into channel sales and into incentive and promotion performance.

Channel data integrity issues begin with the simple challenges of collecting channel data, as illustrated by the figure below.

At the next level, channel data integrity issues arise when companies that have managed to collect the required channel data encounter problems with its accuracy. Inconsistencies in partner names and addresses, coupled with the struggles most companies face in maintaining clean master data, may cause difficulties in aggregating data for analysis.

Finally, channel data integrity can be affected by process problems. For example, the vendor-managed inventory (VMI) warehouse enables sales reporting but not inventory reporting, leading to consistent inventory deltas. And overlapping rebate and incentive programs make it nearly impossible for a company to accurately calculate net sales.

Zyme solves the problem of channel data integrity with:

• A global data capture infrastructure
• A global channel directory that establishes shared master data and definitions across the channel network
• A software platform with built-in algorithms to improve partner compliance and the quality of data reporting

To learn more, visit the Data Acquisition page.