Leading Global Biotech Organization 

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 can help them move their excel spreadsheet farms based 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 result in calculation errors and lower-quality incentives
  • They had to deal with multiple hierarchy exceptions for performance rollups and reporting views
  • Country-based local governance regulations added to the complexity resulting in exceptions for eligibility and vacancy management
  • Data came from multiple data sources in different formats that required significant manual transformation before they can be used for calculations
  • Further manual interventions were required for calculations of certain payout components and year-end catchup recalculations. All of this corresponded to many manual payout adjustments
  • The overall response to market changes was sluggish and significant delays were observed in rolling out sales incentive plan changes
  • The entire sales target-setting process was highly manual with no automated way to communicate goals. A lot of discretionary changes were being made without any audit and justification
  • No proper way was available to validate the changes and financial audits were not easily available

b) The organization reached out to us with the primary goal of completely automating the calculation of their sales incentives Pan-Europe 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 common European data sources, provide flexibility and scale-up with growth, end-to-end incentive compensation management with an easy-to-use interface, and the capability to manage operations in-house. The key requirements from the partner were:

• Reacts, adapts, and scales as the business in individual countries evolve 
  
• Provides EU and Global platforms and services 
  Easy management of EU 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 country launches
• Reflects dynamics within SIP plans relating to business needs for each country
• Provide 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 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, reporting
• Comprehensive reporting to improve transparency for the salesforce across different phases of sales incentive program management

Approach

Aurochs team did a quick proof of concept for the 3 identified key European markets (Germany, Switzerland, and Hungary). As part of POC, we worked with the following approach:

Incentive Platforms Rollout

• • SFTP was set up to collect data from defined folders. Ingested various sales types like packs, sales dollars, and patient population % to calculate the different types of performance metrics
  • Several sales crediting exceptions were managed for both incentive calculations as well as target-setting such as channel exclusions, mid-period price changes, etc.
  • Sales incentive plan components were implemented and configured for a variety of performance metrics such as volume growth, portfolio ranks, clustered performance index, etc.
  • Configured Aurochs Incentive Manager to account for complexities such as variable on-target earnings (OTE), performance qualifiers, payment exceptions, complex matrix-based performance earnings, bonus pool distribution, etc.
  • Eligibility rules were configured for calculations using a combination of calendar days, business days, point in month. To top it all, HR exception scenarios such as new hires, and vacancy management were also managed
  • Multiple short-term and annual contests were also implemented for end-to-end program testing
  • Web-based incentive scorecards were designed and deployed to the field force with embedded what-if calculators
  • Detailed analyst reports were also made available with built-in analytics and visualizations to quickly identify outliers
  • Configured Aurochs Quota Manager to allocate national quotas for individual brand-team combinations to all the underlying geographies using weighted index methodology. In addition, sales target testing was performed to evaluate the overall quality of set sales targets based on historical performance parameters

Outcome

Implementations of all the 3 key markets were completed on time. Several cycles were implemented and managed for each of the individual key markets. Some key performance metrics were:

• • > 50% operational efficiency gain due to complete automation and embedded quality assurance framework
  • Manual calculations and related adjustments completely eliminated
  • Significant annual plan changes were implemented in 3 hours as compared to 2 weeks in their legacy excel based systems
  • The single integrated system rolled out for all countries across all business units. This included base incentive plans as well as contests
  • Identified several calculation issues with their existing legacy system
  • Recommended changes to simplify plan design and achieve an equivalent result with easier communication