Enable vs Phocas

Enable is a rebate management platform, specializing exclusively in rebates. It caters to businesses of all sizes within distribution, manufacturing and retail industries. With a user-friendly interface and customization options, Enable streamlines and automates the rebate process.

The software facilitates the creation, approval, and management of various rebate types and fosters profitable collaboration with trading partners. The platform's strengths lie in its exclusive focus on rebates, continual product improvement, and efficient customer support. It is an effective solution for businesses seeking time-saving, collaborative, and tailored rebate management.

Phocas Rebates is part of a BI and financial planning platform, offering additional products; Analytics, Financial Statements, Budgets & Forecasts, and CRM, that all work together smoothly. Phocas is a great fit for distribution, manufacturing and retail industries. The Rebates product is purpose-built to automate multiple rebate programs - from simple to complex. Streamlining the creation and calculation of all rebate types.

What sets Phocas Rebates apart is its AI-assisted BI foundation, facilitating enhanced analytics. This empowers everyone to go beyond simply managing rebates, to driving their full potential by freely explore underlying data, unveiling patterns and trends that could help uncover risks or identify lucrative opportunities.

Enable offer data transformation as an 'add on' - implying an additional cost to a baseline subscription. Launched in 2016, Enable recognizes the importance of data in rebate calculations. While data integration may not be their core strength, they provide a solution to import data from sources such as ERPs, CRMs, and spreadsheets into an Enable-friendly format. The onboarding process is considered an investment with an onboarding team offering configuration, interfacing and training.

With its business intelligence core, Phocas excels at connecting your data. Since 2001, Phocas has developed long-standing relationships and direct integrations with multiple ERP systems such as Epicor, Infor, Kerridge Commercial Systems, Sage and SAP. Data is pulled from your ERP or any other source directly into one centralized platform, providing a reliable data foundation that everyone can access and analyze. Phocas' finely tuned integration process includes a thorough needs assessment, a dedicated implementation team, secure data warehousing, data mapping, plus training and ongoing guidance from global support teams. All the heavy lifting is done by Phocas, achieving in a matter of weeks what can often take the better part of a year to achieve.

Analysis within the Enable platform offers a summary-level view of your rebate programs with the ability to track performance against forecast. The optional Watchlist application has tabs that include risk and opportunity tabs containing trading partner tiles. Here you can view identified risks outlining the shortfall in spend and subsequent earnings impact. You can also view opportunities showing earnings that could be gained by increasing spending to reach the next accrual band. While a summary-level view is useful, the software lacks the ability to drill into rebate data to unveil underlying patterns or trend. These valuable insights can help you encourage profitable purchasing trends and to also replicate them for other customers or suppliers.

When it comes to rebates, robust analytics truly sets Phocas apart. Maximizing full rebate potential requires more than simply tracking rebate programs. It also requires assessing their structure and impact on sales, profit and margin across customers, products and suppliers – both before and after rebates. With Phocas' BI core and human-friendly interface, this level of detailed analysis is achievable for everyone in your business – not just the data experts. Use near-miss analysis to track overall performance and calculate distances to next accrual bands – helping drive the most profitable purchasing decisions or incentivizing customers to increase purchases. Explore what-if scenarios for non-rebate customers to showcase potential earnings, or harness pro-rata analysis to forecast sales. By freely exploring underlying data, you can identify risks, opportunities and their causes, maximizing potential for both payable and receivable rebate programs.

Enable offer two dashboards categorized as as 'add ons' – implying an additional cost per dashboard on top of a baseline subscription. The executive dashboard offers a high-level view of rebate programs with up-to-date insights and the ability to track trade agreements. The partner dashboard allows you to invite partners to view their progress, helping improve engagement within trading agreements. It's worth investigating what's involved in setting up executive and partner dashboards, and whether you can independently create and customize them. Also confirm if creating and customizing additional dashboards is possible and what costs are associated.

All Phocas products offer comprehensive dashboarding capabilities as a standard offering, at no extra cost. Designed to be human-friendly, everyone can independently create and fully customize unlimited dashboards. You can set up automated alerts and reports, send your insights externally or tag relevant people or teams directly within the rebates product. Phocas dashboards offer so much more than a simple overview, allowing you to freely explore the data behind a table or graph, right down to transactional-level data. They're fast, easy to use and empower you to independently present insights that are easy to understand.

Enable offer advanced reporting as an 'add on' – implying an additional cost to a baseline subscription. Various reports are available, however it is unclear whether they can be customized independently or if support is required from an Enable consultant.

Dynamic, custom reporting comes as a standard offering with Phocas software. Reporting is designed to enable all users to independently create and customize unlimited reports. Propelled by a business intelligence foundation and the ability to set up opportunity and risk alerts, finance, sales and purchasing are all on the same page. Helping them connect, understand and plan their rebate programs to maximize profitability.