Your deals are already planned. Why are you still typing them in?

Picture a Tuesday afternoon on a trade team. A deal has been planned down to the last detail, and it is ready to be created and sent to the retailer. Nothing has been approved yet, and nothing is final, but everything your team needs already sits in your deal planning data.

Then someone opens Deal Center and starts typing the whole thing in again.

If that sounds familiar, you are in good company. Many CPG teams still get their deals from the plan into the system by hand, and it works well enough until volume grows. This post explains why the habit has lasted so long, what it quietly costs, and how Deal Automation takes it off your team's plate.

If you only have a minute, here is the short version: Deal Automation connects your existing deal planning data to DemandTec's APIs, so deals are created in Deal Center without manual entry. Those deals can then be submitted to your retail partners from the same integration. Your team spends less effort on each deal, makes fewer errors, and can handle more volume without the manual work growing along with it.

The deal is done, but the work isn't

If you ask a trade operations leader why their team is so large, they will usually point to deal volume. If you ask the team why each deal takes so much handling, they will point to the process. Both answers are right, and neither one is the whole story.

The real issue sits in the space between them. The information that defines a deal lives in your planning system, while the place where the deal has to exist is Deal Center. The only thing connecting the two is a person, so every deal gets entered twice, and only one of those entries adds any value.

Typing more carefully will not fix that, and neither will tighter process discipline, because the process itself calls for the re-entry. The gap closes when the deal is created from the data that already defines it.

Three ways manual entry quietly costs you

The first cost is that your workload grows with your volume: Every deal takes manual effort, and that effort repeats for each deal that follows, so handling more deals usually means adding more people. The expense rises with them.

The second cost is accuracy: Whenever someone types the same information a second time, a mistake can slip in, and somebody then has to find it and fix it. A process that depends on keystrokes can only be as reliable as the typing behind it.

The third cost falls on your people: When deal creation relies on individuals, your team spends its time on some of the most repetitive work in the process, even though those same people could be working on trade strategy and retailer relationships.

Connect once and let the APIs do the typing

Deal Automation is a scalable, API-driven solution that helps you create and submit deals more efficiently. It starts with a one-time connection. Your existing deal planning data is linked directly to DemandTec through a structured, scalable integration pipeline, so you set it up once rather than for every deal.

After that, the APIs do the repetitive part. They create your deals in Deal Center automatically, which means nobody has to re-enter the details. The same integration can also submit those deals to your retail partners, so you can create and submit them at scale.

The deal itself is exactly the same as before. The only difference is that no one had to type it in.

What your team gets back

When you take the manual work out of creating deals, the effort required for each one goes down, and that adds up quickly across a full year of volume. Fewer details are re-keyed, so fewer user errors need to be found and corrected. Manual work also costs money, so removing it lowers the expense attached to every deal your team handles.

Most importantly, you can create and submit more deals without adding more manual work. The hours your team used to spend keying deals in can go back into the work they were hired to do.

What this is and what it is not

Trade deals are commercial negotiations, and Deal Automation does not change that. It can create a status change, but your team can always review its deals and stays in control of the process.

Deal Automation also does not necessarily make the process faster. What it does is remove the manual work of creating deals, which reduces expense and errors. We would rather tell you that plainly than promise something it was not built to do.

A quick test you can try today

Here is a simple exercise that takes about five minutes. Work out how many deals your team creates in a year, and then count how many people spend their time entering them. That number shows how much manual work Deal Automation is designed to remove, and it is the one that makes the business case.

Teams have been moving deals from one system to another by hand for a long time, and the technology to stop doing that now exists. Once your planning data is connected to Deal Center, your team can enter fewer deals by hand, make fewer errors, and run a process that scales with your trade activity.

Creating deals from the data that defines them is part of what Commercial Trade Intelligence™ (CTI) is built for. Deal Automation is an add-on within the Trade Performance suite, where retailers and their CPG partners plan, fund, execute, and reconcile trade together.

If you would like to see how it would work for your team, you can book a working session with DemandTec.

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