Leading Global Healthcare Organization

Situation

A leading healthcare organization in the process of automating its sales incentive program management globally raised an RFP. They were looking for a solution that can help them move their excel spreadsheet-based legacy calculation 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 based on a variety of sales, activity, and behavioral components result in calculation inaccuracies and manual interventions
  • Country-based local governance regulations added to the complexity resulting in exceptions for eligibility and vacancy management
  • Further manual interventions were required for calculations of certain payout components
  • Exceptions were required at the individual rep level in addition to rep-level incentive targets and product weight definitions
  • Comparison across countries became tedious primarily because of local currency-based sales incentive calculations
  • The overall response to market changes was sluggish and significant delays were observed in rolling out sales incentive plan changes
  • Lack of change audit control and faced significant compliance risks

b) The organization reached out to us with the primary goal of completely automating the calculation of their sales incentives globally (ex-US) 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 their internal data sources, provide flexibility to deploy variations across different countries, and enable end-to-end automation. The key requirements from the partner were:

• • Reacts, adapts, and scales as the business in individual countries evolve
  • Provides global platforms that can cater to local needs
  • Capability to manage multiple countries together with a combined business review
  • Easy management of 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 business growth
  • Reflects dynamics within SIP plans relating to business needs for each country
  • 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

 Approach

The team did a quick proof of concept for the 10 identified countries belonging to APAC, European, and LATAM regions. As part of POC, we worked with the following approach: 

Incentive Platforms Rollout

• • Configured and deployed standardized sales incentive solution for all the 10 countries
  • Enabled end-to-end process automation while accounting for all the business rule exceptions
  • Accommodated a variety of plan types across significantly different business units using an out-of-the-box pick-and-choose plan component framework
  • Configured Aurochs Incentive Manager to account for complexities such as variable on-target earnings (OTE), performance qualifiers, band-based curves, etc.
  • Eligibility rules were configured to manage special scenarios such as new hires, leaves, flexible working arrangements, etc.
  • Out-of-the-box input and output QA framework was configured to identify any data issues or potential outliers upfront
  • A global performance summary was designed and developed with performance and payout information for all applicable countries to allow for easier cross-country business review
  • Detailed analyst reports were also made available with built-in analytics and visualizations to quickly identify outliers

Outcome

Implementations of all the 10 key markets were completed on time. Some key performance metrics were:

• • Configured system for all 10 countries within a week
  • Identified calculation and display mistakes in legacy excel calculation workbooks
  • End-to-end automated single standardized system for all 10 countries
  • Cross-country performance comparison enabled through built-in currency conversion feature  
  • Manual calculations and related adjustments completely eliminated