Out of Territory

Should be easy, my order entry does it all the time, can anyone else lend a hand?

Art,
are you using DMAP and if so, what level are you using.

Merlin, I ship stuff out all the time to RFG dealers by simply gaining agreement ahead of time on the rate of compensation for service, supplies, training, delivery etc. We then have the equipment drop shipped to the dealer for subsequent installation. The pricing level used to order the equipment shouldn't pose a problem.

I will say that our compensation offer is better than the corporate rate. It also helps to have a feel for the cost of living etc. etc. for the area you're shipping to.

The only problem I have with this , is were it is going the only Ricoh Dealer is IKON.

I have experience doing this because I am our purchasing manager. (I have six ship-outs pending at the moment -- oh, the gray hair LOL. Just kidding on that gray hair thing.)

First thing: if you want to have Ricoh ship directly to the installing dealer, you have to use DMAP and your client has to be registered for a DMAP level through the Oracle system. But, that leads to....

The problem: You are right to be concerned that they won't qualify for the DMAP1 commitment level, because if you don't make your purchasing level commitment Ricoh will hit your dealership with a "chargeback" and you will lose any pricing advantage you had.

So, what to do when your client won't make the DMAP1 purchasing commitment. There's no good solution, because of Ricoh's chargeback policy and commitment level. Ever since they went from 9 levels to 6 and put a minimum commitment on level 1, "smaller majors" are SOL. My DSM told me flat-out that they wanted to discourage handling ship-outs for smaller accounts.

With the goal of getting equipment to the dealer, this is what our DSM told us to do: We contact a dealer in the territory directly (as Chuck mentioned above), make a private arrangement for installation and service, order the equipment on our wholesale contract and have it shipped to us, then re-ship to the installing dealer. Not good because you have to pay more and double freight. We pay the standard Ricoh DMAP install comp and cpc's to the other dealer, and try to make some of the extra cost up on the cpc we charge the client.

The private agreement also allows us to better control how our client is billed, and we blessedly don't have to go through Ricoh for service. In almost all cases, we have the servicing dealer bill us and we bill the client. Most of our major account clients prefer to have one consolidated bill from us for their multiple locations.

The second solution is to see if the installing dealer already has the equipment in his/her warehouse that they can use and sell to you. You will probably end up paying their wholesale price, but you can then avoid the double freight.

As for IKON, we also avoid using IKON whenever possible, but finding other dealers has not been a problem. Have your order person ask his/her contact at Ricoh Order Processing for a recommendation. The ladies in the Western region are great at recommending good dealers.

Obviously, you can avoid all this if you can get your major account to commit to the level 1 minimums. Perhaps sitting down with them and explaining the dilemma will encourage them to increase their purchases. If they don't commit to the minimum, you can't offer them DMAP1 without the very real risk that you will lose money.

Lastly: the only way I know to avoid a chargeback on a commitment level is to use the US Communities contract on DMAP6, but there are very few major accounts that qualify for US Communities.