Looking at how rebate work actually happens across EU and APAC, before changing anything.
The business lacked a reliable baseline for how rebate work varied across regions.
Reviewed processes across EU and APAC through interviews and system walkthroughs.
Created a baseline view of common steps, variations, and manual work.
Gave product and technology teams evidence to use before roadmap decisions.
A global business needed to understand how rebate processes worked across EU and APAC before making design and technology decisions. On paper, the process looked fairly clear: offers were created, reviewed, set up, monitored, adjusted, and settled.
In reality, the work changed depending on the country, customer type, channel, system, and team involved. Account managers, pricing teams, finance, marketing, and customer operations each saw a different part of the process.
My role was to lead the regional research that turned that scattered knowledge into a clear picture of what was really happening, a truthful current-state baseline the organisation didn't have before.
Rebate work looked process-defined on paper. In practice, every region had adapted it to local context, different channels, different customer types, different finance systems, different tools, different workarounds. Each function had a partial view. Account managers knew their customers and their commercial commitments. Customer operations knew where the friction was because they were absorbing it. Finance knew where the data didn't reconcile. Pricing knew the rules. Marketing knew the offers. No one team held the whole picture.
The risk was that design, product, or technology decisions would be made against an idealised process that no region actually ran. Solving for the diagram would have missed the operating reality.
Without a comparable baseline of how things actually worked, the organisation couldn't safely prioritise what to automate, what to standardise, or what to leave alone.
Research was the work, not a step before the work. Interviews were structured around how each role actually spent their time, not how the process documentation said the process worked. Account managers talked about negotiating offers with customers; customer operations described the manual translation between offer terms and system configurations; finance walked through reconciliation gaps; pricing explained the rule complexity behind apparently simple offers; marketing showed how campaign timing pulled rebate processes in directions they weren't designed for. Process walkthroughs and tool observation supplemented the interviews, what people said they did and what the systems forced them to do weren't always the same thing.
On paper one process. In practice, every region had adapted it to local channels, customer types, finance systems, and team structures. Some adaptations were legitimate responses to real differences; others were accumulated workarounds nobody had cleaned up.
Account managers knew their customers and commitments. Customer operations knew where the friction was, because they were absorbing it. Finance knew where data didn't reconcile. Pricing knew the rules. Marketing knew the offers. No one team held the whole picture, and the process couldn't be understood from any single role's view.
A lot of the apparent smoothness of the process was actually customer operations absorbing complexity invisibly, translating offers into system configurations, handling exceptions, chasing missing details, resolving downstream issues. None of this showed up in process diagrams.
GSAP, Excel trackers, local dashboards, and assorted workflow tools influenced how work actually moved. The 'process' was partly a product of what the systems would let people do, and where they wouldn't, people built workarounds in spreadsheets.
Not every regional difference was a problem to solve. Some reflected genuinely different customer types, channels, or commercial structures. The work distinguished variation that needed standardising from variation that needed accepting.
Without a comparable current-state view, future workflow, automation, integration, and roadmap decisions would have been made against assumption rather than evidence. The baseline was the prerequisite, not the deliverable.
The work gave the organisation a clearer baseline of how rebate processes operated across EU and APAC. It showed where the process was consistent, where it varied, which roles carried hidden manual work, and where tools or local workarounds were shaping the experience.
It did not try to solve the whole transformation programme. Its value was more specific: it gave design, product, and technology teams a grounded view of the current reality before decisions were made about future workflows, automation, integration, or roadmap priorities.
The main impact was turning scattered regional knowledge into something comparable, discussable, and usable for design decisions.