Cerena for Manufacturers reduces manual reconciliation, flags margin risk early, and gives your team the insight for building stronger commercial trade strategies through clean data .

The Problem: Trade Spend Is Still a Blind Spot

For manufacturers in the food and beverage industry, trade programs are a necessary part of doing business, but managing them is messy, manual, and margin-draining.  The bottom line: for foodservice manufacturers, revenue leakage from poorly managed claims isn’t just a finance issue, it’s a commercial one. 

Today’s commercial teams are expected to:

• Fund growth through rebates and discounts
• Honor complex pricing agreements with buyers and GPOs
• Track what’s been earned, what’s been paid, and what’s still open

Yet most trade spend teams are forced to reconcile claims after the fact, using fragmented data from distributors, operators, and internal systems that don’t talk to each other.

This lag isn’t just painful, it’s expensive. And it’s getting worse as contract structures grow more layered and finance teams demand more accuracy, faster.

What to Consider Now

Three trends are turning trade spend oversight into a mission-critical problem for manufacturers:

1. Financial Scrutiny Has Increased
   FP&A, accounting, and audit teams need real-time accrual forecasting, not month-late spreadsheets.
   
2. Distributor and Operator Volume Is Fragmenting
   Companies are juggling more partners, each with unique pricing, claims, and contract terms.
3. Legacy TPM Systems Aren’t Built for This Complexity
   Most TPM tools stop at claim ingestion. They don’t help you reconcile, forecast, or enforce pricing at scale.

Why We Built Cerena for Manufacturers

Unlike traditional Trade Promotion Management (TPM) tools or manual Excel processes, we recognize that clean data isn’t an extra step, it’s the foundation of smarter trade spend management. We created the Cerena Solution Suite to help manufacturers stop bleeding margin from trade spend inefficiencies, so your team can stop reacting and start controlling spend proactively. And with iTradeNetwork’s OMS, the same system that powers order flow, you have a natural extension point for trade spend. By centralizing fulfillment in OMS and then layering on automated claim validation and contract alignment, manufacturers can unlock full end-to-end visibility from order to claim; driving fulfillment efficiency on the front end, and margin protection on the back end

Cerena for Manufacturers:

• Connects real contract data, order history, and invoice lines
• Automates claim validation and exception handling
• Provides clear audit trails for claims, contracts, and pricing
• Powers financial forecasting using live, validated claim data
• Anchors trade spend directly to order data, linking what was fulfilled with claims, deductions, and contracts

The Power of Clean, Connected Data

One of the biggest challenges in trade spend isn’t just processing claims, it’s trusting the data behind them. That’s why the Cerena Solution Suite includes built-in data standardization and enrichment.

By unifying item, contract, and pricing data across systems and partners, our solution ensures that your claim is matched to accurate terms, validated SKUs, and buyer-specific logic before it hits your balance sheet. Because this validation is tied to real fulfillment data, trade spend oversight isn’t siloed. It’s directly connected to order execution, preventing double-dips, reducing errors, and creating a single source of truth across fulfillment and spend.

You gain:

• Standardized item and pricing data across GPOs, distributors, and internal systems
• Buyer-specific contract alignment that reflects real deal structures
• Automated enrichment that fills gaps and flags inconsistencies before they become risks

Get Ahead of the Spend

Cerena for Manufacturers is already helping leading brands:

• Recover hundreds of thousands in missed rebate value
• Cut claim reconciliation cycles by 50%
• Improve finance confidence in spend accruals

Request a Trade Spend Strategy Session