“ CDM has definitely made us more successful. We have raised our level of awareness of metrics, like inventory days on hand, active reseller base and revenue contribution by Partner type, enabling our management team to understand and respond to what’s actually taking place in the market right now.”— Kevin Nusky, Director of Marketing and Sales Operations, Schneider Electric

Promoting Innovative and Responsible Energy ManagementSchneider Electric is a global specialist in energy management and automation, with operations in more than 100 countries, offering integrated solutions across multiple market segments, including leadership positions in nonresidential and residential buildings, industries and machines manufacturers, utilities, infrastructure, data centers, and networks.

In today’s “always on, always available” world, where businesses can’t stop and downtime is measured in dollars, the company provides protection against some of the

leading causes of downtime, data loss and hardware damage, power problems, and temperature.

As a global leader in network-critical physical infrastructure, Schneider Electric sets the standard in its industry for quality, innovation, and support.

Leveraging CDM to Improve Inventory Management“Our company has successfully worked with Channel Partners since the early ‘90s on a global scale,” explained Kevin Nusky, Director of Marketing and Sales Operations in Schneider’s IT Business Unit. “Over 65% of our sales go through a two-tier or three-tier distribution system.”

Schneider Masters Its Sales Channels with Zyme CDM

Channel Visibility Challenges• Limited inventory tracking –

available only for larger partners• Lack of SKU-level visibility

to inventory in stock• Limited ability to create

programs to reduce stock levels

• Monthly, rather than weekly, reporting outside of key markets created difficulties in responding to market conditions and managing partners proactively

• Lack of confidence in channel sales and inventory data due to errors introduced by manual reporting

• Partner management based on limited information was reactive and tactical

Schneider Electric Case Study | Page 1

To maintain strong visibility and develop an understanding of what is happening in their markets, channel managers need to see comprehensive sales out data from channel partners to end customers.

“My team is working on finding answers to questions like, ‘What is the velocity on sales out?’ and ‘How healthy is our channel?’ Then we slice and dice that data all the way down to individual channel partner types,” Nusky added.

As a result of its years of experience working with channel partners, Schneider has honed its best practices in gathering and utilizing specific data.

“In the past, we looked at days of inventory on hand, but because we were collecting the data manually, we got only the information on total inventory from each partner. We did not have visibility at the product category level, which negatively impacted the accuracy of our ability to act. We are now getting detailed inventory views from Zyme, not only with sales out data, but with a detailed inventory list.”

The Zyme platform is a powerful business tool for Nusky’s team.

“I can now understand, at the product family level, which products are sitting in stock and which ones are selling through. I can think about how I target rebates and volume incentive programs to sell the remaining inventory, or jump-start something that hasn’t done well.”

Another benefit of gathering and analyzing more granular data is that Schneider has improved the accuracy of its inventory days-on-hand calculation (DOH).

“Many of our products are ordered through distributors and drop-shipped to their customers, so those items are never held as inventory. Our previous inventory DOH calculation did not have the ability to distinguish between these product categories so we included all of them. Now, with better product level information, we can make sure that drop-shipped products are not included in the inventory DOH calculation, improving our overall accuracy.”

Schneider has been able to broaden the scale of its inventory tracking, expanding beyond the small subset of large partners that were being tracked prior to implementing Zyme.

Schneider Electric Case Study | Page 2

Management Goals• Increase access to, and

awareness of, channel sales and inventory data across company

• Increase sales through strategic channel partner management based on key metrics

• Expand the number of partners reporting

• SKU-level inventory visibility• Weekly, rather than monthly,

reporting to improve agility of channel sales

Realized Benefits• Processed 49 million

transactions and seven years’ of historical data in less than three weeks, with 100% accuracy

• Condensed the size of Schneider’s Master Channel Data File by 50% from 6.7 million records to 3.4 million via elimination of duplicates and correction of erroneous records

• Achieved better channel coverage, with more partners reporting

“ We tried to maintain our own channel data management solution, but quickly realized that with the amount of energy and effort it required, it wasn’t sustainable.”

Reducing Rebate Overpayments“With nearly 1,000 reporting partners scattered across every developed country (including Mongolia), it is challenging to effectively collect and analyze sales and inventory data, particularly when some of the reporting from smaller partners is done manually,” according to Kevin Nusky.

“In the past, we were manually processing all of the files from our reporting partners. Outside of our key markets, we were not getting reports as frequently as we wanted – partners were reporting just once a month. Zyme’s solutions have helped us automate our data collection processes and increase the frequency of reports from monthly to weekly.”

With Zyme’s CDM solutions and best practices, Schneider has reduced the overpayment of rebates.

“We were paying out more for rebates than we should have, because we

were using a cost field that was incorrect,” Nusky said. “Once we automated, we became very strict about the fields partners needed to report, with rules and definitions for each field. When we began receiving the automated data from Zyme, we had an ‘aha’ moment that told us we had been paying out on the wrong numbers.”

Automated reporting has helped Schneider reduce human errors that can be introduced through manual reporting, and eliminate the potential for file manipulation before his group receives it – two benefits that improve confidence in the data across the company.

Increasing Revenues through Better Partner DevelopmentNusky is most enthusiastic about the impact Zyme has had on channel partner development and, by extension, sales results.

“With Zyme, we definitely have the ability to perform a finer analysis on

our partners, and look closely at their level of activity. We now know which partners are most active and how they are contributing, compared to inactive partners. I can quantify the value of a partner by their program status level.”

Schneider also assesses partners by examining their frequency of purchase and total volume.

“I’ll check prior year sales to learn whether a partner sold just one big deal that landed in their lap, or whether they actively pursued ten smaller sales. I’m interested in understanding that. It reveals their level of commitment. Then, I compare that data to the current year and develop a list of partners who showed activity last year, but none this year. I use that information to work with my sales team, and suggest ‘this is the target list you should call on and look for growth initiative opportunities and low-hanging fruit for partner expansion.”

Has this approach paid off in higher sales?

“Yes, it really has,” Nusky affirmed. “We’re doing this actively in Europe right now and, while we have not quantified the results precisely, we know there has been an improvement in overall sales because of the increased engagement and mind share we are generating.”

Schneider Electric Case Study | Page 3

“ Zyme has illuminated the way we look at our partners on a large scale.”

Improving Accuracy, Reporting, and Awareness“There are a host of intangible benefits that we have gained from Zyme,” Nusky revealed. “By adopting a more standard approach to partner reporting based on Zyme’s best practices, we have improved the accuracy of our reporting, rebates, and metrics, and increased our agility in managing our business. We have dramatically increased the scale of our channel data management, with more partners reporting more granular, more useful data.”

With more partners reporting more transactions, and improved confidence in the partner data, the value of the data collected by Zyme continues to permeate throughout the company.

“Zyme has helped us raise our level of awareness and visibility to channel sales and inventory. Our people can better understand what key metrics in the channel to look at, and which are most important. We’ve also become

more sophisticated in our analyses. In the past, our financial scorecards were all about sales and orders. Now, we are looking at active partners, average selling prices, number of registrations, and even program membership by type.”

Accelerating Channel Growth and SuccessAnother senior executive within Schneider, Vice President of Channel Strategy and Channel Operations Jamie Bourassa, sees strategic opportunities to expand the company’s use of Zyme.

“We are moving toward the ability to take the multiple pieces of data we’re getting from Zyme and begin to create a cohesive set of automated value drivers,” Bourassa said.

Part of this is combining information from Zyme to automate inventory management. For instance, if Schneider sees that they have extra units of one product in a certain area, their channel data may indicate that there’s a customer in that region that used to buy many units of a particular product, but hasn’t ordered in a while. This deeper visibility gives Schneider managers the ability to execute new marketing campaigns to reach out to customers who have become inactive.

Every month, an automated email message is sent to the appropriate partners in the database with a special incentive from the reward system. When partners claim those rewards, channel managers see their response in the point of sale data,

and can measure the ROI on those campaigns.

Schneider continues to invest in Zyme to reach the next level – a fully integrated digital experience using point of sale and inventory data to automate the ways they manage their channels, and make targeted management decisions based on near real-time channel intelligence.

Additional Benefits to Schneider • Improved the overall gathering and

utilization of channel specific data• Broadened the scale of inventory

tracking to include a greater number of channel partners, enabling significant improvements in inventory management

• Improved the accuracy of inventory days-on-hand calculations

• Fine-tuned the targeting of rebates and volume incentive programs based on rich data collected from the channel, thus producing better results

• Achieved more accurate rebate payments due to standardization of data

• More closely analyzed the performance of individual partners, making it possible to deliver better guidance and motivation

• Successfully benchmarked the performance of key metrics against industry best practices

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“ Zyme has helped us dramatically improve the accuracy of our inventory calculations.”