Every number on this site, and where it came from

What the numbers are

The benchmark ranges throughout this site come from two sources, combined and rounded deliberately coarsely:

• Published research on channel-incentive management, pricing excellence, deduction management and trade-promotion effectiveness — the body of work that has been measuring these processes across industries for two decades.
• Our own implementation experience — what match rates, validation rates, claim recovery rates and accrual variances actually look like before and after the systems work, across manufacturers and distributors of varying size.

Why they are ranges

Because the honest spread is wide. A distributor with four hundred supplier agreements and three ERPs from acquisitions is not comparable to a single-site business with forty agreements. Channel depth, programme complexity, data quality and how many trading partners report in their own identifiers all move these numbers by multiples, not percentages.

A single headline figure would be more persuasive and less true. We would rather publish “0.3 – 1.1% of purchase spend” and be useful than publish “1%” and be quoted back at us in a situation where it does not apply.

What they are good for

Framing a diagnostic. If your claim-line validation rate is 30% and the target is above 99%, that gap is worth investigating regardless of whether the benchmark is precisely right.

Finding the question you cannot answer. On every benchmark table we suggest treating any row you cannot produce a number for as the finding. That is usually the most valuable output of reading one of these pages.

Prioritising. The ranges differ by an order of magnitude between leak points, which is a reasonable guide to where to look first even before you measure.

Where they should not be trusted

As a forecast of your recovery. Nobody can tell you what you will recover from a website. The gap between your current state and the benchmark is an upper bound on the opportunity, not an estimate of it.

As a business case on their own. A benchmark should get you as far as agreeing to measure. The measurement is the business case.

In sectors we have named loosely. Where an industry page gives a sector-specific number, it reflects the shape of that sector’s programmes — but sub-segments vary. Medical device distribution and pharmaceutical wholesaling share a page and do not share a cost structure.

How to measure your own

Three exercises, all doable in days with data you already have:

1. Validation rate. Take one quarter of inbound claims and validate every line against your authorisation history. The invalid percentage is your number.
2. Match rate. Take one month of partner-reported sell-through and count what resolves to your product and customer masters. The remainder is invisible revenue.
3. Group reconciliation. If you belong to a buying group: purchases, versus submissions, versus what the group settled. Three numbers that should agree.

In our experience these three produce more internal agreement in a week than any amount of benchmark citation does in a quarter — because they are your data and nobody in the room can argue with them.