Leading Global Vision Care Organization

Situation

Quota Setting for one of the leading global vision care organizations, with operations in 60 nations and customers in more than 140 nations.

The problems that the client was facing with their Pharma business unit were somewhat unique:

• The company took ownership of glaucoma eye drops from one of the leading global pharmaceutical organizations in mid-2021. During the transition period, which was a couple of years long, the promotions of the product had been suspended by the parent company creating a gap in the market presence of the product/product trajectory.
• The biggest question was, “Do we treat it as a launch product or as an almost mature product?”, as the quota-setting strategy for both is very different and the actual sales history fitted into none.
• Allocating quotas based on historical sales alone could not be a valid approach as the history was impacted by the lack of promotion and had a downward trend in most territories

The client reached out to Aurochs with the help of our professional services partner. They were looking to get access to end-to-end automation of their quota-setting process with change agility and responsiveness, the ability to incorporate local guidance and knowledge, improve the quality of their allocated quotas, and provide flexibility to model different scenarios. The key objectives were:

• The agility and flexibility to try out different permutations and combinations of historical sales and potential parameters for quota allocation
• Ability to define markets at the most granular level and to add factors like demographics, patients, physicians, spending, etc to the mix.
• Allocating configurable quotas through a system that enables business users to simulate various scenarios without the need for technical know-how.
• Use both sales and non-sales-based parameters for quota allocation and give credence to local knowledge while doing quota allocation
• Integrated rule-based quota refinement to ensure that the final quota set is accessible across required hierarchy levels for zero-sum modifications inside of pre-configured restrictions
• Analytical visualizations and statistical summaries to analyze if the quotas set are fair, paying for performance, and so on
• Ability to customize historical periods and add caps and floors to handle outliers and make sure that quota distribution is in line with company goals
• Ability to define scenarios using different forecast scenarios
• Deploys integrated quota management platform with backup support and service operations
• High levels of automation and repeatability enable them to focus on the actual business, not the quota calculations

Approach

Aurochs developed a comprehensive approach to ensure that the quality of allocated quotas is high and the process is repeatable in nature. The first important step was to analyze the historical sales with and without promotions, the key to allocating quotas could rest in what we found. For this study, we segmented the territories by size (small, medium, and large) based on their historical product volume and looked at their sales performance trends. Our key observation there was that the behaviour of the three buckets varied significantly. In certain types of territories, the downward trend in volume and market share was significantly higher than in certain other segments.

This helped us identify potential factors for different territory segments and account for them in the quota allocation. We simulated several scenarios using different factors and associated weights. The in-built analytical visualizations in the tool helped us identify the bias in quotas for different segments and evaluate if they were in line with strategic business objectives.

The ability to add caps and floors ensured that outliers had been fairly considered and bias, in any form, had been avoided. The entire project took about 6 weeks, with weekly touchpoints to discuss our findings and results.

Quota Manager Platform Rollout

• Data from different sources were collected (primarily, in-house data warehouse), collated, sanitized, and ingested in an automated manner with the click of a button using our proprietary Data Manager
• Aurochs Quota Manager was configured to account for different scenarios involving – historical performance data periods, different sales factors, caps, floors, etc.
• Configured testing scenarios to evaluate the quality of methodology by allocating quotas for different historical periods
• Designed summary calculation workbooks and reports for quota communication

Outcome

The entire project was completed in 6 weeks’ time. The comprehensive management of the quota cycle ensured a high level of confidence from different process stakeholders.

• End-to-end automation of the quota allocation process
• Ability to evaluate the quality of quotas at the individual level as well as at the role level
• Capability to leverage a variety of sales and non-sales-based potential factors
• Easier identification of bias in the quotas due to geographical performance trends