SIP solution suite deployed across three European markets for a leading global biotech

Situation

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 could help them move their Excel spreadsheet-farm-based system to a new-age system with enhanced transparency for their salesforce.

Key challenges faced by the sales operations team across countries

• A team-wise, Excel-based calculation system for each country with a person-dependent flow.
• Complex and varied incentive rules per team and product combination resulted in calculation errors and lower-quality incentives.
• Multiple hierarchy exceptions for performance rollups and reporting views.
• Country-based local governance regulations added complexity, resulting in exceptions for eligibility and vacancy management.
• Data came from multiple sources in different formats, requiring significant manual transformation before use in calculations.
• Further manual interventions were required for certain payout components and year-end catch-up recalculations, corresponding to many manual payout adjustments.
• The overall response to market changes was sluggish, with significant delays in rolling out sales incentive plan changes.
• The entire sales target-setting process was highly manual, with no automated way to communicate goals, leading to discretionary changes made without audit and justification.
• No proper way was available to validate changes, and financial audits were not easily accessible.

Primary goals & partner requirements

The organization reached out with the primary goal of completely automating the calculation of their sales incentives pan-Europe while gaining the capability to manage their ongoing program in-house. The key requirements from the partner were:

• Reacts, adapts, and scales as the business in individual countries evolves.
• Provides EU and Global platforms and services.
• Easy management of EU master, sales, market, and other (CRM) data on the platform.
• Pulls 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.
• Provides 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 an 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, and reporting.
• Comprehensive reporting to improve transparency for the salesforce across different phases of program management.

Approach

• The Aurochs team conducted a quick proof of concept (POC) for three key European markets: Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary.
• The POC validated the platform's calculation capabilities and configuration approach before full rollout.

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 a 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 three key markets.
• Implementation and management of several cycles for each individual key market.
• Over 50% operational efficiency gain due to complete automation and an embedded quality assurance framework.
• Elimination of manual calculations and related adjustments.
• Significant reduction in time for implementing annual plan changes: three hours compared to two 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 the existing legacy system.
• Recommendation of changes to simplify plan design and achieve equivalent results with easier communication.