The asymmetry you are managing
A manufacturer’s channel programme has a structural information problem: you fund it, and your partner reports on it. The distributor knows what they sold, to whom, at what price, and how much inventory is sitting in their warehouse. You know what you shipped. Everything between those two facts arrives as a file, on their calendar, in their identifiers.
Every leak in the manufacturer’s list follows from that asymmetry. Debit claims that cannot be validated. Sell-through that will not match. Promotions whose evidence never arrives. Price protection on inventory you cannot see. None of these are integrity problems — they are the ordinary consequence of data crossing an organisational boundary without a reconciliation layer.
What changes when you close it
Three capabilities do most of the work:
Cross-reference. Partner part numbers, end-customer codes, ship-to hierarchies and GPO identifiers resolved to your masters, with the unresolved remainder surfaced as work rather than dropped into a suspense file. Without this, nothing else is possible.
Line-level validation. Every claim line matched against a live authorisation for that part, that customer, that price and that window — with only exceptions routed to a human. This is the change that makes 100% coverage cheaper than sampling.
Evidence bound to money. MDF budget, vendor commitment, CAP, deliverable and claim as one linked object, so a fund cannot be drawn past its cap and cannot be settled without the proof attached.
Where to start
Pick the programme with the highest claim volume — usually ship & debit or its industry equivalent — and run a diagnostic on one quarter of real claim data. The validation rate you find is almost always the most persuasive number in the business case, because it is your own.
Then extend. Because everything runs on one configurable engine and one ledger, the second programme is configuration rather than a new project.