Top Global Surgical & Vision Care Organization

Situation

A multi-country roll-out (US & Canada) of our comprehensive sales compensation management solution suite for one of the leading surgical & vision care companies with more than 100 complex plans across 2 business units deployed on a single standardized platform.

a) They faced significant challenges with their existing solutions (2 leading incentive solutions used by their sales operations team) 

• • Significant manual interventions as the existing solutions were not able to handle plan complexities
  • Data was required to be collected manually from source systems and required a lot of manual transformations before they could be used for actual calculations
  • Change management was very time-consuming and many times required the sales operations team to calculate payouts for individual plan components manually and upload them to the system
  • Annual plan rollouts and ad-hoc changes were delayed resulting in interim at-target payouts to not miss the critical payroll schedule
  • Business leadership was immensely frustrated with the pace of the rollout of strategic plan changes as that resulted in non-alignment of the majority of salesforce and business chasing the system timelines for critical goals 

b) The organization reached out to us with the primary goal of completely automating the calculation of their sales incentives for the US as well as Canada while significantly reducing the overall effort required from their team. They were looking for an ideal partner who can deliver agility & responsiveness, multi-country coverage, data pull from their internal data sources, provide flexibility to manage complex plan types and performance measures,  and end-to-end serviced solutions. Their primary objectives were:

• • Reacts, adapts, and enables faster system rollout with annual and intermediate ad-hoc plan changes
  • Provides a standardized platform to implement all the applicable business units for both the US and Canadian regions
  • Ingest data automatically and transform it to system-desired formats with the click of a button without any manual intervention
  • Support implementation of a variety of plan types and complex overachievement logic with the application of multi-layer qualifiers
  • Access and enable relevant functionality as client needs change based on evolving business requirements
  • Reflects dynamics within sales incentive plans relating to different business units and country dynamics
  • Deploys integrated sales incentive platform with backup support and service operations
  • High levels of automation and repeatability, enable them to focus on the actual business, not the incentives systems
  • Plan configuration, testing, quota setting, calculations, administration, approval, reporting
  • Fully serviced as client prepares for changes in business goals

Approach

Aurochs team did a comprehensive demo for their key business stakeholders. We walked them through our design philosophy and explained how we can configure their plans using just our out-of-the-box capabilities. This helped us move to the next step where our team did a quick proof of concept for a few roles belonging to both of their business units in the US. We matched results for a couple of months and identified quality issues with their existing calculations. This allowed the client to gain confidence in our system capabilities and eventually helped us sign the contract.  Once the project was signed, we took a very methodical approach to roll out systems for individual countries and business units. We worked with key client stakeholders to develop a detailed understanding of their existing data sources for different business units in each country. Our partner organization worked with them to develop a comprehensive data lake which eventually became the source system for the incentive calculations. All 4 North American business units were deployed on a single unified instance.

Incentive Platforms Rollout

• • Data from heterogeneous sources are collected through scheduled SFTP pull, collated, sanitized, and ingested in an automated manner with the click of a button using our proprietary Data Manager
  • Aurochs Incentive Manager was configured to account for complex calculations related to overachievement, portfolio-level qualifiers, multipliers, etc. In addition, the eligibility manager was configured to account for a variety of scenarios related to new hire status, transfer, leaves, etc.
    ○ Data sanctity for previous payout periods preserved without compromising current period calculations
    ○ Easy-to-use interfaces were configured to manage any change parameters during ongoing operations
    ○ Plan change & financial impact modeling were made available to evaluate the performance of upcoming changes using historical data
  • Designed & deployed field incentive performance scorecards and detailed Admin calculation reports using Aurochs Field Reporting Manager

• • We configured the platforms and ran 2 cycles in parallel with their existing systems to ensure system completeness and high-output quality
  • Our professional services partner deployed an onsite team to work closely with the key client stakeholders and track the progress of the overall implementation
  • Periodic steering committee meetings were scheduled to assess the direction & progress of the project
  • A comprehensive dashboard was designed to track the progress of implementation, discuss risks, and any requested changes
  • The management framework was designed in consultation with the client to track monthly operations and SLAs
  • Operations resources from our professional services partner team worked with a predefined calendar to ensure the timely delivery of reports every month

Outcome

Implementations of all 4 business units were completed on time. Several cycles were implemented and managed for each of the individual business units. Some key performance metrics are:

• • >75% Reduction in change rollout time
  • Single standardized platform with end-to-end automation resulting in a 50% lower cost of ownership for the client
  • Delivery of strategic insights to evaluate the performance of the plans on an ongoing basis
  • End-to-end automation & 10x faster processing result in much more time available with the client sales operations team for other value-added activities
  • The majority of changes go live in less than a week