Many a time while choosing an Incentive
Compensation application, companies tend to focus on core capabilities like
crediting, incentive calculation and reporting capabilities. Less attention is
paid towards productivity tools that are required by administrators to run the
application smoothly and efficiently. In the absence of such tools, even the
best equipped applications fail to "Go-Live".
In a series of blogs on this topic, I will
attempt to list and describe the set of productivity tools that sales and
incentive compensation administrators should be looking for when they are
shopping for their incentive compensation application.
Let's start by looking at a standard flow
of the incentive compensation processes and then focus on the productivity
tools that are required at different stages. Not all stages will be discussed
in these blogs as every stage may not require productivity tools. Below process
flow uses terminology from Oracle Sales Cloud-Incentive Compensation although
other products will have similar flows.
Import Participants- This process step may encapsulate tasks like creating salesreps and sales managers in the application along with updating their attributes. Below productivity tools may be relevant here
-Ability to import/create salesreps from an external file/tool. Typically the field level information in this task includes salesrep name, manager details etc.
-Ability to update salesrep attribute information using an external file/tool. Salesrep attributes are typically fields like country, home currency, role etc. Note: Where multiple currencies are involved, it is also useful to have the ability to import currency exchange rates through an external file.
Configure Crediting Rules- Crediting rules define who receives how much credit for a business transaction. Multiple criteria maybe be used along with defining some sort of a hierarchical structure to enable 'rollup' of credit to managers if required. If the number of salesreps in your organization are high, these may lead to a high number rules to create and manage. Adding to that, if multiple criteria are involved, the number of clicks required in the applications to do this activity increase exponentially. Hence a productivity tool that enables below becomes very important
-Ability to mass create and maintain credit rules through an external file or tool.
In subsequent blogs, we will look at
productivity tools that can be used in other steps of the Incentive
Compensation process.