Agency/Manufacturer - Utilizing Your MarketTime Staging & Production Environments

This guide provides a general outline and best practices for reviewing your company's data within MarketTime's Staging environment. If you are moving from Brandwise to MarketTime, the Staging environment should be used to confirm that all data looks correct for final migration and to get comfortable with the system.

What is the MarketTime Staging Environment?

MarketTime's Staging environment is a mirror of its Production, or live system. It's a way to test/review things in a manner that doesn't affect any live data (with some caveats, noted below).
Staging is not available to all, and access is only granted under special circumstances.

Important Things to Know

When using the MarketTime Staging environment for testing or data review, there are important things you'll need to know that may affect your use of the system.

• Your data migration will include the standard 2 years of order/invoice/customer history (additional years incur a cost). This is the same in staging and when you go live.
• For those customers moving from Brandwise to MarketTime, the Staging environment represents what you'd expect when you go live on MarketTime.
  • • If you are practicing the steps used in order transmission, inviting customers to your B2B site, creating Salespeople, etc., please make sure that you have test emails in place before completing the final steps so that emails are not accidentally sent.
• Currently, some types of data and features are not supported in MarketTime and may result in your Brandwise data appearing differently when viewed in MarketTime.
  • • Assortments are not currently supported, and orders that contain Assortments will only display the top-level item, not the items within.
    • Multiple Price Lists per customer are not currently supported, so a maximum of one Price List (aka "Price Code" in MarketTime) will appear.
• If you're a Manufacturer attempting to test our Public API, some endpoints are not optimized for the Staging environment and therefore won't represent a 1:1 experience with our Production (live) environment.
  • • Examples: loading product images and tracking information for orders.

Recommended Actions to Take While Reviewing Data in Staging

Please take the time to review each of the suggestions below. The Staging environment is your opportunity to review your data for accuracy and play around with the features available to you in MarketTime.

• Know where to find things - Most navigation within MarketTime is done with the Navigation Menu on the left side of the screen. Familiarize yourself with the various Customer and Manufacturer settings. This will help you support your team/company with general navigational questions you may receive. 
• Verify that your data is displaying as expected:
  • • Salespeople - ensure all Salespeople are present
    • Divisions & Territories - Ensure proper setup and that Salespeople are assigned appropriately
    • Commissions and Invoices (historicals)
    • Vendor (Manufacturer/Brand) details - spot check for products, images, shipping and payment terms, and contact information to receive orders
• Create a test Customer and test Manufacturer- Practice creating test accounts to familiarize yourself with the process.
  
  • • Use this test Manufacturer to practice various item or document management features as well. Example: importing items, images, catalogs. This is important information if you will be managing your Manufacturer's data.
• Create Orders/Manage Orders
  • • Practice creating, transmitting, and reviewing test orders. Be sure to check for appropriate assignments. We recommend that you run tests in a few different divisions and/or territories using different Salespeople and Manufacturers
• Running Commissions - Create a test run of commissions to practice using the tool and seeing how the data flows and reports

Recommended Actions to Take While Reviewing Data in Production

In addition to the items on your task-list, found HERE, please take the time to send a test order from the Production environment as well. 

1. Create a customer test account.
2. Choose a vendor or vendors who have new order delivery methods confirmed (based on your earlier communications with them)
3. Be sure to notify the vendor(s) that you will be sending a test order to verify receipt. The testing in this environment will ensure their chosen Order Delivery method has been set up properly in MarketTime.
4. For this test you will go through the entire process including transmitting the order.  Note that territories and divisions will not be available.

Comparing Order/Commission Totals in MarketTime and Brandwise

In cases where you wish to compare order or commission totals between MarketTime and Brandwise, these are the reports we recommend.

For more information about how to run reports in MarketTime, see our article on the subject.

Below is a handy comparison for Order Statuses between MarketTime and Brandwise to keep in mind:

MarketTime

The following two reports include data to compare order/commission information respectivley.

Orders

For the purpose of comparing order totals by Manufacturer, we recommend report 2.2 Order Totals

When running this report, be sure to toggle the Status for Manufacturers, Salespeople and Salespeople to Pay to Both to ensure both Active and Inactive records are included. For Retailers, we recommend setting the filter to All.

We also recommend filtering for specific Order Statuses using the corresponding filter button, and choosing the following:

The result will be totals by Manufacturer for the date range/criteria chosen.

Feel free to use the Sorting Options button to re-group the report by Salesperson if desired.

Commissions

For the purpose of comparing high-level commission totals based on Checks entered, we recommend report 4.1 Check Log Statement.

When running this report, be sure to toggle the Status for Manufacturers to Both to ensure both Active and Inactive records are included.

The result will display a list of checks using the date range/criteria chosen.

Feel free to use the Sorting Options button to re-group the report by Manufacturer if desired.

Brandwise

Orders

For the purpose of comparing order totals from Brandwise, we recommend the Sales Analysis Tool.

When running this report, be sure to keep in mind the statuses noted above and in the MarketTime report to ensure you can compare your data as accurately as possible.