Sovos ShipCompliant recently announced new Product Registration Online (PRO) renewal enhancements that will help suppliers and states ensure even more efficient workflows. With these changes, PRO users enjoy fast, easy electronic brand and label registrations for beer, wine, spirits and no-COLA products in participating states. Oklahoma was the pilot state for these enhancements, with their mid-April renewal period launch. We’ve received excellent feedback regarding the efficiency and time saving associated, and plan to expand this functionality to the remaining PRO renewal states as well.
Manual workflows are difficult to maintain, especially as organizations expand and work to adapt to customer needs. The COVID-19 pandemic certainly exacerbated this issue, and pushed many states, suppliers and distributors to make changes to daily operations.
PRO renewals happen at different points in the year, with each state having various rules, regulations and fees. To address this variability, we created a standardized workflow, but one that could be customized and applied to each state that we serve. Users now have the ability to export and reimport eligible renewals for all licensees that are renewing as part of a workflow that condenses all steps into an intuitive touchpoint.
Sovos ShipCompliant worked to provide an exportable template that gives all renewals at the outset. Customers can indicate on a spreadsheet which product registrations should be renewed or not and can then reimport it. Additionally, the export feature shows expanded, detailed information regarding the registration renewals in question to assist with reconciliation. There is now a simple, efficient process for PRO renewals that can help users continue to move forward.
What does this mean for brand registration?
There are a few brand registration challenges that we have solved through the PRO renewal enhancements. First, the new export option enables sharing of eligible renewals to obtain feedback from suppliers. Distributors can export all renewals, break the spreadsheet apart and then send it to suppliers to receive necessary feedback on which registrations they should be renewing. Additionally, distributors can reimport all selections into the system, rather than going through one by one to manually select or deselect eligible renewals.
Second, users can now select their renewals in manageable sections. The bulk selection option is magnitudes faster than the manual selection option, and can be done incrementally outside of the workflow.
Finally, having the additional ability to identify renewal data enables easy fee reconciliation for licensees.
Another way that these PRO upgrades improve user efficiency is cutting down on clicks and time for pages to load. Imagine that a user has 3,500 products that are eligible for renewal. Previously, they had to go through one page at a time and make their selection. The new brand registration capabilities are immensely more efficient.
Offering a condensed, efficient workflow
While these PRO renewal enhancements were initially triggered through distributor feedback in Oklahoma, they will add value for all states that currently use PRO renewal. Feedback from customers remains a key part of our product development process and commitment to our users’ success.
