Leading Global Biotech Organization
Aurochs SIP Solution Suite deployed across 3 European Markets
Situation
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A leading biotech organization in the process of automating its sales incentive program management Pan-Europe raised an RFP. They were looking for a solution that can help them move their excel spreadsheet farms based system to a new-age system with enhanced transparency for their salesforce.
a) Some of the key challenges that were faced by the sales operations team members across countries were:
- Team-wise excel based calculation system for each country with person-dependent flow
- Complex and varied incentive rules per team and product combination result in calculation errors and lower-quality incentives
- They had to deal with multiple hierarchy exceptions for performance rollups and reporting views
- Country-based local governance regulations added to the complexity resulting in exceptions for eligibility and vacancy management
- Data came from multiple data sources in different formats that required significant manual transformation before they can be used for calculations
- Further manual interventions were required for calculations of certain payout components and year-end catchup recalculations. All of this corresponded to many manual payout adjustments
- The overall response to market changes was sluggish and significant delays were observed in rolling out sales incentive plan changes
- The entire sales target-setting process was highly manual with no automated way to communicate goals. A lot of discretionary changes were being made without any audit and justification
- No proper way was available to validate the changes and financial audits were not easily available
b) The organization reached out to us with the primary goal of completely automating the calculation of their sales incentives Pan-Europe while providing them the capability to manage their ongoing sales incentive program in-house. They were looking for an ideal partner who can deliver agility & responsiveness, multi-country coverage, integration with common European data sources, provide flexibility and scale-up with growth, end-to-end incentive compensation management with an easy-to-use interface, and the capability to manage operations in-house. The key requirements from the partner were:
- Reacts, adapts, and scales as the business in individual countries evolve
- Provides EU and Global platforms and services
Easy management of EU master, sales, market, and other (CRM) data on the platform - Pull data from SFTP without any manual intervention
- Access and enable relevant functionality as client needs change leading into and beyond country launches
- Reflects dynamics within SIP plans relating to business needs for each country
- Provide the capability to make changes through parameters and built-in functionality for faster change management
- Deploys an integrated SIP platform that accounts for end-to-end program management
- Provides access to approved picklist of plans by type to enable country set-up for incentive processes
- High levels of automation and repeatability for faster operations
- Plan design, testing, quota setting, calculations, MBO management, administration, approval, reporting
- Comprehensive reporting to improve transparency for the salesforce across different phases of sales incentive program management
Approach
- Aurochs team conducted a quick proof of concept (POC) for three key European markets: Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary.
- The approach for the POC included the following steps
Incentive Platforms Rollout
- SFTP set up to collect data from defined folders, ingesting various sales types (e.g., packs, sales dollars, patient population %) for calculating different performance metrics.
- Management of several sales crediting exceptions for both incentive calculations and target-setting, including channel exclusions and mid-period price changes.
- Implementation and configuration of sales incentive plan components for various performance metrics (e.g., volume growth, portfolio ranks, clustered performance index).
- Configuration of Aurochs Incentive Manager to handle complexities like variable on-target earnings (OTE), performance qualifiers, payment exceptions, complex matrix-based performance earnings, and bonus pool distribution.
- Configuration of eligibility rules using a combination of calendar days, business days, and point in month, with management of HR exception scenarios like new hires and vacancy management.
- Implementation of multiple short-term and annual contests for end-to-end program testing.
- Design and deployment of web-based incentive scorecards to the field force, including embedded what-if calculators.
- Provision of detailed analyst reports with built-in analytics and visualizations to quickly identify outliers.
- Configuration of Aurochs Quota Manager to allocate national quotas for individual brand-team combinations across underlying geographies using weighted index methodology, with sales target testing performed to assess overall target quality based on historical performance parameters.
Outcome
- Timely completion of implementations for all 3 key markets.
- Implementation and management of several cycles for each individual key market.
- Key performance metrics achieved:
- Over 50% operational efficiency gain due to complete automation and embedded quality assurance framework.
- Elimination of manual calculations and related adjustments.
- Significant reduction in time for implementing annual plan changes: 3 hours compared to 2 weeks in legacy excel-based systems.
- Rollout of a single integrated system for all countries across all business units, covering base incentive plans and contests.
- Identification of calculation issues with existing legacy system.
- Recommendation of changes to simplify plan design and achieve equivalent results with easier communication.