Cash Back Now

Nationwide Marketing Group is a Winston-Salem based company that negotiates buying contracts between its members (independent dealers such as regional appliance stores) and manufacturers in the home appliance and electronics industry.  Members buy from these contracts year round, but Nationwide also conducts semi-annual conferences where manufacturers and members meet to discuss new products and programs and to transact business.  To promote buying activity at the conferences, manufacturers will offer rebates for 'at-show' purchases.  On behalf of the manufacturer, Nationwide enhances the rebate incentive by fulfilling these rebates on the spot during the conference through their 'Cash Back Now' program. After the show, Nationwide produces consolidated invoices for the manufacturers to get reimbursed for the rebate money paid out to the dealers.

Challenge

The 'Cash Back Now' service quickly gained popularity and participation soared. Nationwide hired a number of temporary workers to key the rebates at the conferences. The pressures of keying high volumes of transactions in conjunction with 'just trained' temporary help resulted in an unacceptable level of incorrect member check amounts, incorrect manufacturer invoice amounts, and slow turn around for producing checks at the conference.

Stratapult was retained to review the 'Cash Back Now' service and suggest process improvements. 

Solution

Stratapult designed and delivered a solution that directly targeted the high volume keying and inconsistency between payables and sales transactions. Stratapult developed a process that captured sales transactions and other pertinent data from Nationwide's financial systems (Great Plains) to make the keying process simpler and more intuitive. The solution was enhanced with reporting that enabled Nationwide to monitor the sales volume at a show, identify incomplete sales transactions, and balance the checks produced for members against the remittance invoices for manufacturers.

Impact

This solution turbo-charged the entire 'Cash Back Now' service by cutting the 'at-show' keying in half, and eliminating 'after-show' manual work to correct inconsistencies between payables (member checks) and sales (manufacturer invoicing).  The need for temporary resources at the shows was reduced by 50% and the training of those resources was simplified.  The new reporting enabled real-time balancing of payables and sales at the show so that the 'after-show' production of manufacturer invoices to recoup Nationwide monies was reduced from weeks to days.

Additionally, the 'at-show' turn around time to distribute member rebate checks was sharply reduced.  Previously, many checks would not be available until the last day of the conference, but this solution enabled Nationwide to distribute checks back to members within a few hours of purchase.  This increased the value and power of the 'Cash Back Now' program, which in turn encouraged higher buying volumes at the shows.  The higher buying volumes at these shows continue to strengthen the Nationwide position with its members and the appliance and electronics industry manufacturers. 

"I want to thank Stratapult for the great job done ['Cash Back Now] and the super support," said Ed Kelly, President of Nationwide Marketing Group.