Account Review now handles Kozy Shack's entire trade promotion planning, deductions and payments. With the tool, Kozy Shack is now able to conduct promotion analysis, develop standardized plans and evaluate budgets in relation to planned and actual spending. It also offers the ability to process payment requests electronically, increase the accuracy of demand planning forecasts and electronically organize and clear deductions to the specific budget, plan, and brand for accurate P&L analysis. Account Review software utilizes Microsoft's .NET technology, one of the most advanced Web-based tool sets and also supports ANSI compliant SQL database engines, such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

"The system generates promotion plans to a sort of 'what if' scenario where they can plug in all of the figures to determine their projected lift on a trade spend," says Rich Lehan, director of IT for Kozy Shack. "When the customer and broker are mutually happy with the plan, they will approve the plan and make it active."

On the payment and deduction side, Account Review stems short payments from customers. The system allows Kozy Shack to send questionable short payments back to its customers with detailed proof that the short payment is incorrect.

"It gives us visibility at a micro-level where beforehand, short payments went into a big bucket and essentially got lost," says Lehan.

Now that deductions and payments are managed through the Synectics tool, Kozy Shack's complex paper trail of spreadsheets is a thing of the past.

"We were the king of Excel," says Jeff Schuler, director of business systems for Kozy Shack. "There were spreadsheets all over the place and there was nothing tying them together. We had spreadsheets to track our spreadsheets."

Before the Account Review implementation, users keyed promotion updates into Kozy Shack's business systems, sometimes three to four different times, to ensure they were captured on all orders. With the aid of Synectics, promo updates are automatically executed. If there is a seven percent deduction on a particlular order, for instance, Synectics allows Kozy Shack to look at the plan based on that seven percent and if it matches, the deal is closed on that particular promotion and customer. If that same customer shaves off 10 percent instead of seven, Synectics alerts Kozy Shack to the three percent difference and a dispute is generated.

Without the automated tracking system, Schuler believes Kozy Shack's customers would clearly have the upper hand in deduction disputes.

"Now there is far less confusion and far better departmental communication," says Schuler. "That was the biggest windfall right away. Now there's a global lens that allows us to focus in on the entire business from a deduction point-of-view."

Sometimes, less obvious factors such as spoiled stock, feed into the deduction cycle. Synectics hones in on possible spoilage problems for Kozy Shack and ranks its accounts on rate of spoilage as measured in the deductions cycle.

"You realize it's a nice, little profit center for the customer," says Kevin Mackin, director of trade marketing for Kozy Shack. "Synectics gets you a 30,000 foot view of what's going on with the business. You can look at the customer, the class of trade and the aggregate business. If you have a problem it enables you to drill down to find out where the problem is."

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A specific flavor of pudding, for example, might be immune to targeted sales efforts. Once the pudding is put on sale and trade dollars are put against it, the revenue might fall short of expectations, simply because consumers buy that particular flavor whether it carries an attractive sales price or not.

"Why spend money on it?," says Mackin. "Synectics will point out things like that. The system gives us a process we didn't have before. We're all on the same page, looking at the same screen and the same data. It makes decision-making a lot easier in the long run."

Perhaps the most valuable asset of Synectics is its ability to adapt to a rapidly changing business climate. If Kozy Shack were to double its business in the next six months, for instance, Synectics would be more than able to handle the transition, according to Mackin.

"We are set to grow now because we have built a strong foundation for our sales group," says Mackin.