RELEX Solutions Launches Deal Management for Smarter Collaborative Promotion Planning

New capability gives retailers and suppliers a centralized way to plan, negotiate, and evaluate deals, improving collaboration and unlocking greater value from promotions

RELEX Solutions has today announced the launch of Deal Management, a centralized planning and collaboration environment that combines vendor deal collaboration and promotional planning into a single platform.  

The new capability will empower retailers and suppliers to jointly plan, optimize, and evaluate promotion deals and corresponding funding. Deal Management is available as part of RELEX pricing and promotions within the unified retail and supply chain planning platform, to support the full collaborative promotion planning process. RELEX aims to improve the retailer – supplier promotion processes, enabling them to create seamless collaboration workflows that maximize ROI for both parties.

Retailers today rely heavily on vendor-funded promotions, with roughly 70% of promotions funded directly by suppliers. Retailers are also facing growing pressure to run promotions that are both financially effective and trustworthy for consumers. A recent RELEX consumer survey on promotional trust found that 84% of shoppers view promotions as misleading, and 76% say inconsistent offers reduce their trust in a retailer. These findings highlight the need for clearer, better-planned promotions that are consumer-centric and rooted in shared data.

Deal Management gives retailers a single system where annual supplier agreements, investment envelopes, campaign commitments, and tactical promotion details can be created, negotiated, and tracked together in one environment. It provides a shared workspace for retailers and suppliers, replacing email and spreadsheet-driven processes with structured workflows, financial transparency, and promotion forecasts to make informed decisions early in the planning cycle. Additionally, once suppliers are onboarded, RELEX allows retailers to monetize their analytics, enabling suppliers to subscribe to promotional forecasts embedded in the planning process.

“Retailers invest heavily in promotions, yet so much of that value is lost because funding decisions, performance insights, and supplier negotiations sit in different places,” said Mikko Kärkkäinen, co-founder and CEO of RELEX Solutions. “With Deal Management, we are giving retailers and suppliers a shared source of truth to plan promotions that deliver predictable value. It removes manual effort, streamlines collaboration workflows, and supports decisions based on expected performance instead of guesswork.”

Deal Management supports strategic pricing and promotion planning, campaign execution and post-event analysis, enabling retailers to improve margin, strengthen value perception, and react to market conditions with greater accuracy. Retailers can connect vendor funding decisions with performance-driven promotion strategies, ensuring commercial teams have one environment to plan, optimize, and evaluate promotions with confidence.

“Promotions are complex commercial agreements that require strategic execution and performance accountability to extract real value,” said Ananda Chakravarty, Vice President, Research, IDC Retail Insights. “What RELEX Deal Management addresses is the limited visibility into how funding, execution, and performance connect for most retailers. Bringing supplier funding, promotion planning, and expected outcomes into one system gives retailers a practical way to evaluate deals to increase value-driving promotions.”