Soft Limits

Consumer Goods Cloud Trade Promotion Management controls some of its processes by using limitations to ensure convenient response times.

For example, a key feature in the app is planning trade promotions and reviewing the impact of promotions at the account level. A key account manager (KAM) can leverage daily and weekly input data about products, sales, volumes, cost of goods, baselines, and more. While planning and reviewing promotions, the KAM can access key performance indicators (KPIs) to verify how promotional tactics change the promotion's effectiveness. These calculations require strong computation engines and handling of millions of data cells. But the computing capacity for the results in a specific response time is limited by various parameters, such as available computational resources, bandwidth, memory, or rendering limitations in the user interface.

No straightforward checksum exists if a promotion based on these parameters is calculated easily or drives the computation engine to its internal limits. Many additional factors, such as how complicated the KPI’s calculation rules are or how deep the KPIs are nested, are relevant. The most reliable indication is the cross-product of the number of products, tactics, KPIs, and weeks because the computation engine internally spins up a data-cell structure on those dimensions.

The product of these four dimensions is only an indicator and isn’t a guarantee to determine the feasibility of computing a promotion scenario. Factors such as product hierarchies and aggregation levels can further create additional data cells inside the computation engine.

• Limit Example: Promotion
  Promotions and account plan soft limits are validated by the system. See the most important promotion limits and the rationale behind these limits. These examples can be transferred to an account plan. But as the tactic dimension in the examples isn’t relevant for account plans, the dimensions aren't considered for the account plans.
• General Soft Limits
  See the general soft limits for Consumer Goods Cloud Trade Promotion Management. These soft limits aren’t related to a particular business process, but are required to define the framework.
• Soft Limits of Account Plan
  Although an account plan object doesn’t exist, all limits mentioned here are valid for a year. The soft limits for an account plan depend on multiple parameters. For example, an account plan's performance depends on whether the Read KPIs are fetched from daily or weekly tables.
• Soft Limits of Promotion
  See the soft limits for promotion.
• Soft Limits of Trade Calender
  Learn about the soft limits for trade calendar.
• Soft Limits of Funds
  Use funds while running trade promotions so that users can use funds to manage the movement of money. Money movement is facilitated in TPM by multi-fund transactions. Multi-fund transactions reflect transactions through their relationship to funds.
• Soft Limits of Rate-Based Fundings
  Rate-based fundings (RBFs) provide an alternative way to handle the management of trade budgets. RBFs ensure a fair distribution of the trade budget and better brand and category management.
• Soft Limits of Claims
  Promotions involve compensating retailers for promotion tactics. This compensation is reflected in TPM as claims linked to the associated tactic.
• Soft Limits of Real-Time Reporting
  Real-time reporting (RTR) gives you a live view of the effect of your promotion planning for the selected customer and period. This live view helps you create a more satisfying account plan for a brand or against overall targets. As changes are immediately reflected in the report, you can act instantly and adapt promotion planning right away.