Bypassing Legacy Systems Obstacles: How One Company Built Its Intelligence to Identify and Collect Trade Allowances

This chapter describes both the nature of trade allowances and the unique approach taken by one major retailer in overcoming legacy system obstacles in its efforts to identify and collect allowances. Trade allowances have the potential for very substantial returns for retailers and they are often used as a bargaining tool between manufacturers and retailers. Also, the nature of the allowances is that they are rarely ever accountspecific and, as a result, are collected by organizations on a first-come, first-served basis. In other words, whichever organization manages to claim the allowance first is generally the organization that will get the funds from manufacturers. As a result, there is only a small body of literature on the subject and virtually no literature that describes the systems used for trade allowance identification and collection. It is This chapter appears in the book, Business Intelligence in the Digital Economy, edited by Mahesh S. Raisinghani. Copyright © 2004, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING