Trade Management Business Partner: Lantmännen Unibake
Blacksmith’s foodservice trade promotion managemet (TPM) “isn’t just a systematic tool, it’s a partnership,” explains Denise Donati, Commercial Controller at Lantmännen Unibake.
The group at Lantmännen knew it was time to implement a foodservice trade spend solution when handling programs and deductions through emails and spreadsheets became unmanageable. “We needed a systematic approach to consolidate all our trade spend activities — where we could validate claims, track trade programs, and analyze our spending to ensure the best ROI for our trade dollars,” says Donati.
Given that the Lantmännen team’s trade process was once manual and not well defined, working with the application and organization has helped them team develop processes to support its limited resources and various trade spend activity.
During Smoke Jumpers 2019, Lantmännen Unibake was the recipient of the customer award for Business Partner.
Brian Maloney, Blacksmith Applications adds, “Lantmännen wanted to move beyond best practice – what are others doing, what are others not doing. Lantmännen wanted to learn without complicating anything. They took all the best practice and put it into play, and the results speak for themselves.”
Lantmannen Unibake uses Blacksmith TPM formerly known as GoSimple.
“We continually call upon Blacksmith’s industry knowledge, looking for the right answer as we uncover various issues (now that we have our all trade data available in one system). We have daily communication with our TPM support team where we can dig into the details of our claim deduction backup, discuss next steps on our phased implementation plan or even develop custom reports that will help with our limited EDI capabilities.”
➥ Learn how Lantmännen Unibake resolved a distributor contract error to reclaim dollars.
Donati continues, “In a short time, we have already uncovered claims issues and started recovering deductions that we never knew existed. We have changed program deals that have existed for years to better match our needs and the needs of the customer.”
As for those manufacturers who aren’t using a TPM? Donati “absolutely” recommends a systemic approach to trade spend management. The automated process “makes it easy to query and report on trade spend dollars, which makes providing analysis to leadership more effective.”
