Tracking channel activity is a vital part of the vendor's activities. Accurate tracking provide high visibility of distributor, reseller and general channel spread and allow decisions on appropriate deployment of resources to be made to gain competitive edge. In the current economic climate, channel tracking activities can seem cumbersome and costly and with pressure on reducing head-count being all-pervasive, outsourcing can provide an highly attractive solution to in-house projects.

Context Channel Management Service can support the vendor in building a balanced channel structure and value proposition. Activity within the channel can be monitored and analysed. Account activity can be assessed and customer-specific groupings (such as account managers, subsidiaries, product groupings, reseller classifications etc.) can be introduced to allow segmentation of activity.

Outsourcing the data collection, processing, enrichment and quality control functions to Context is cost-effective compared to in-house operations due to the economies of scale Context can bring to bear in carrying out this kind of work both for other similar customers and its own Market Research Publishing business. Examples of Context's economies of scale are in Data Cleaning, where the same Distributors participate in a variety of our programs.

Maintaining channel management activity in-house can be costly, time-intensive and in many cases the required infrastructure and resources are simply not available. Context is able to leverage its 25+ years experience of the industry and provide both the required infrastructure & product and market knowledge to provide a high quality service. We have substantial Product and Reseller databases that are being maintained by product specialists and multi-lingual staff and can make use of the economies of scale arising from dealing with multiple vendors for this type of activity.

A major hardware manufacturer outsourced their retail category management program to Context. The aims for the customer are to outsource the costly and time-consuming activity of collecting and handling daily store-level data on a pan-European basis and receive actionable reporting.

The reports and analysis allow the hardware manufacturer to:

1. Measure sales and inventory development of time
2. Assess the success of promotions to daily and store-level granularity
3. Manage inventory levels appropriately by reducing out of stock of high-selling products in relevant stores, stabilising weeks of stock at optimum levels and dealing with stock protection activities
4. Provide reports to their account managers which allow these to performance, the activity in their region or group of stores and use these reports as a basis to discuss further action with the retailer directly.
5. Measure the performance of their account managers

Typical usage scenarios have been the evaluation of the opening of a new flagship store and the impact of promotional products within that store, quarterly reviews of account manager performance, evaluating the weeks of stock on introduction of a new product and changes over the product life-cycle.

A major hardware manufacturer has outsourced their channel management program to Context. The program entails dealing with distributor sales and inventory on a pan-European basis and adding the hardware manufacturer's sales to the distributor for further analysis.

Context is able to use its advanced databases to enhance the data both on a product and reseller level. On a reseller level Context is able to de-duplicate data and to enrich the data by adding channel and geographical information.

The reports and analysis allow the hardware manufacturer to:

1. Measure sales and inventory development of time (weekly or even daily granularity if required) down to product level
2. Analyse channel structure at distributor and reseller level
3. Determine cross-border activity by distributors
4. Analyse sales by reseller, reseller location and reseller channel
5. Determine top resellers and who is distributing them
6. Assess the relationship between shipments, sales to distribution and distributor inventory for further insight
7. Efficient supply chain management through weeks of stock analyses

Typical usage includes comparing top partners' activity to general reseller activity, analysing a distributors cross-border shipment of sales and curtailing this activity by strengthening the local relationship with the distributor, assessment of the impact partner program activities on the relative shares of business of the distributors.