Top 5 Global Pharma Organization

Situation

Sales Incentive Calculation Engine & Field Reporting for the US region for one of the top 5 global pharmaceutical giants. Deployed incentive system with automated one-click processing along with integrated data transformation for raw data formats driven by parameters to drive monthly calculations.

a) The clients’ sales operations team faced significant challenges with the leading SPM solution (used primarily in the pharmaceutical industry) that they were using to calculate sales incentives for more than 60 countries: 

• Significant manual touch points were required to transform raw data formats from different countries as the existing solution was not able to handle data complexities. Data was required to be collected from defined SharePoint folders and required significant manual transformation before they could be fed to the system for calculations
• Several components were not implemented due to complexity and were calculated outside the system manually and fed to the system for final reporting
• There were multiple team members required to manage operations which took anywhere from 5 days to 15 days depending on the size of the country 
• The entire change management process was tedious and took a long time before the actual rollout 
• The entire plan change process was tedious with no access to analytics and plan modeling ecosystem
• Several quality issues were faced with incentive payments due to management of complex eligibility special rules around new hires, onboarding, transfer, leave management, flexible working arrangement
• There was also a requirement to manage numerous exceptions related to manager rollup hierarchy, variable on-target earnings (OTE), non-standard index measure calculations
• The legacy system design was highly dependent on the implementation styles of team members resulting in lower maintainability and higher people transition risks
• In addition, a higher frequency of plan changes to support evolving needs across different business units made ongoing incentive program management people-intensive and very expensive

b) The organization reached out to us with the primary goal of completely automating the calculation of their sales incentives while providing them the capability to manage their ongoing sales incentive program in-house with no dependence on external consultants to do the same. They were looking for an ideal partner who can deliver change agility & responsiveness, enable automated data pull from designated sharepoint folders, provide flexibility to manage complex plan types and performance measures,  and an easy to use  platform that can scale for global deployment. Their primary objectives were:

• Reacts, adapts, and enables faster system rollout for intermediate ad-hoc plan changes
• Manage complex eligibility calculations within the incentive platform instead of applying manual adjustments
• Ingest data automatically from defined SharePoint folders for each country 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 non-standard complex index-based performance measures
• Access and enable relevant functionality as client needs change based on evolving business requirements
• Deploys integrated sales incentive platform with easy-to-use non-technical business interfaces
• High levels of automation and repeatability, allow quicker processing and high-quality sales incentives

Approach

Aurochs team did a comprehensive POC for one of the most complex business units in the US and matched results with their existing system. This allowed the client to gain confidence in our solution capabilities. As part of this POC, we did the following things:

Incentive Platforms Rollout

• Raw data formats were collected, collated, sanitized, ingested, and transformed 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.
  ○ Parameter tables  were designed to drive ongoing sales incentive calculations
  ○ Enabled one-click processing from data load to reporting
  ○ Easy-to-use interfaces were configured to manage any change parameters during ongoing operations
  ○ Analytics and visualizations were made available to evaluate plan performance and effectiveness
  ○ Input validation and output validation summary reports were made available to identify any anomalies and outliers upfront
• Designed & deployed field incentive performance scorecards and summary reports across hierarchy levels using Aurochs Field Reporting Manager
  ○ Excel and PDF-based reports to align with their current communication paradigm
  ○ Implemented a new interactive HTML report with an embedded what-if calculator

• Implemented plan changes for the new year
• The implementation required changing the core measure from multi-level goal attainment to a layered ranking plan
• Eligibility exceptions were further changed to account for the new plan type

Outcome

The entire incentive system implementation process was completed and a detailed UAT was done with the client. Some key performance outcomes were:

• Complete automation of complex eligibility calculation paradigm with zero manual intervention
• The entire implementation process took 4 weeks as compared to 13 weeks in the legacy system
• Plan and report changes implemented for annual plan changes live in a workshop in ~4 hours as compared to 3 weeks in the legacy system
• Reduced the total operations time by more than 50%
• Standardization in implementation enabled easy resource transition and reduced project risk
• The integrated quality assurance framework identified input issues early and reduced the output processing timeline by over 50%
• Won the contract to deploy an incentive compensation solution suite in more than 100 countries across 3 key businesses