Every 3.5 seconds, a Banner Engineering sensor is installed somewhere in the world. Banner solves problems for most of the manufacturing companies in the Fortune 500, as well as the startups changing the industry with leading-edge production.
As a channel-based business, Banner sells its sensors and related products through distributors. Banner has a set list price and each distributor gets a special discount off that list price, so they can make a profit. For example, if a list price is $100, the distributor may purchase the item for $60 after their discount. However, they may need to sell to the customer at a price of $50 in order to get the sale. Formalized sales agreements allow distributors to provide a deeper discount for sales to specific customers.
Banner had created more than 4,000 of these different sales agreements to meet the needs of their growing customer base. Unfortunately, having so many different, manually-maintained sales agreements was causing confusion for both customers and employees. As a result, Banner employees spent too many working hours just sifting through the different discount offerings, hoping to find the right match.
This disorganized system also increased the risk of revealing sensitive customer pricing data. If a sales associate accidentally used the wrong agreement — or forgot to manually edit it — they could inadvertently expose one customer’s pricing to another. Moreover, the sales agreements and price lists contained many items that were no longer active. In fact, at any given time, up to 40% of price list line items were irrelevant!