The Need
Companies need a better way
to create, manage, and administer sales compensation
plans. The nearly universal thicket of
complex, multi-layered, interlocking spreadsheets
must become a single coherent system that models the
sales
force's compensation and reflects how it
advances the
company's business goals.
The current method sometimes produces
conflicting goals and nobody even pretends to really
understand how all the spreadsheets work or whether the
plans
actually advance the corporation's business goals and
strategy. Even minor changes to the plan create
major revisions to the spreadsheets - spreadsheets
with a poor track record for accuracy and
intelligibility.
Then there is the problem of
payment, far too much time spent calculating who is owed
what. And even more time spent by the
recipients to check if accounting got it
right!
The Challenge
Compensation planning and
administration needs to be simpler, more
reliable. It must enable changes without causing
massive angst or introducing yet another round of
spreadsheet errors. The sales team needs to
trust the results and be able to see the data on which
compensation is based. Management needs a way to
assure the plans complement each other as part of an
overall corporate strategy.
The new system, to be
offered as a service to a wide range of businesses,
must scale far beyond the size of any individual
business. It must also allow the developer to
quickly, easily, and safely accommodate the unique
operational needs and wants of each customer.
The ReFrame Application
Service Grid Solution
A powerful and flexible set
of services were created and deployed on the ReFrame
Application Service Grid. These services
operate as a whole to produce a complete
compensation planning and management system.
Individual services on the
ReFrame Application Service Grid take in sales data
through ReFrame adapters and allocate them to each
payee. Another service provides the
sophisticated logic that calculates payments and
turns each employee's results into a personalized
spreadsheet that is automatically emailed on a
predictable schedule. Other services factor in
bonus plans and incentive payments.
Additional services allow
management to graphically see the interaction between
the various compensation plans to assure the company's
overall goals are being served. These services
connect to end users through a ReFrame Adapter into
a Rich Internet Interface
(RIA).
A ReFrame Adapter allows
interaction with the third-party database that
records and tracks customer orders and shipments.
Scale, Change, Scale,
Change ...
This system was designed to
scale to tens of thousands of payees and millions of
transactions.
The ReFrame Application Service Grid allows the
services, or portions of them, to be distributed
across as many additional computers as needed to
achieve the required levels of performance and
throughput.
ReFrame enables you to quickly, easily, and safely
accommodate the changing size and shape of your
business.
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