An SIP solution suite validated across 10 countries for a leading global healthcare organization.

The challenge

The organization sought to automate global sales incentive program management, prompting an RFP. Its sales operations teams across countries faced significant challenges:

• Team-wise Excel-based calculation systems for each country, with person-dependent flow.
• Complex and varied incentive rules per team and product combination, leading to calculation inaccuracies and manual interventions.
• Country-based local governance regulations adding complexity, with exceptions for eligibility and vacancy management.
• Manual interventions required for certain payout components.
• Exceptions needed at individual rep level, in addition to rep-level incentive targets and product weight definitions.
• Tedious comparison across countries due to local currency-based incentive calculations.
• Sluggish response to market changes, with significant delays in rolling out plan changes.
• Lack of change audit control, creating significant compliance risks.

Objectives

The organization's primary goal was complete automation of global (ex-US) sales incentives while enabling in-house management. Desired partner attributes included agility, responsiveness, multi-country coverage, integration with internal data sources, flexibility for country-specific variations, and end-to-end automation. Key requirements:

• Reacts, adapts, and scales with evolving business in individual countries.
• Provides global platforms catering to local needs, managing multiple countries together with a combined business review.
• Easy management of master, sales, market, and CRM data, pulling data from SFTP without manual intervention.
• Enables relevant functionality as client needs change and business grows.
• Reflects dynamics within SIP plans based on each country's business needs.
• Deploys an integrated SIP platform for end-to-end program management.
• Provides an approved picklist of plans by type for country setup, ensuring high automation and repeatability for faster operations.

The solution

Incentive platforms rollout

• Configured and deployed a standardized sales incentive solution for all 10 countries.
• Enabled end-to-end process automation while accommodating business rule exceptions.
• Utilized an out-of-the-box pick-and-choose plan component framework to accommodate various plan types across different business units.
• Configured Aurochs Incentive Manager to handle complexities such as variable on-target earnings (OTE), performance qualifiers, and band-based curves.
• Configured eligibility rules to manage special scenarios like new hires, leaves, and flexible working arrangements.
• Implemented an out-of-the-box input and output QA framework to identify data issues and potential outliers upfront.
• Designed a global performance summary providing performance and payout information for all applicable countries, to facilitate easier cross-country business review.
• Provided detailed analyst reports with built-in analytics and visualizations for quick identification of outliers.

Approach

• A quick proof of concept (POC) was conducted for the 10 identified countries across APAC, European, and LATAM regions.
• The POC followed a structured, methodical approach to validate the solution across each market.

The results

All implementations were completed on time for the 10 key markets. Key performance metrics:

• System configured for all 10 countries within a week.
• Elimination of manual calculations and related adjustments.
• Identification of calculation and display mistakes in legacy Excel calculation workbooks.
• A single end-to-end automated, standardized system for all 10 countries.
• Cross-country performance comparison enabled through a built-in currency conversion feature.