Each year, ACCO Brands Europe makes thousands of agreements with its European channel partners aimed at encouraging profitable behaviour – for example by promoting the adoption of new products or extended ranges – to drive the growth of the partner business towards a mutually beneficial outcome. However, the details of these agreements were never integrated with ACCO’s data system.

Simpson Associates worked with ACCO to build a bespoke solution on the Microsoft .NET platform to capture all the specific details of the rebate systems. Then, they built an IBM Cognos 8 BI reporting solution that would report and analyse all this data comprehensively.

For ACCO the best result of the solution has been the insight into rebates without conditions and unprofitable agreements. Using this information, the business can now optimise their partners’ behaviour, significantly improving profitability for the future.