Maximizing the SPM Technology Investment with Managed Services
The Challenge
SCC had vision for its Sales Performance Management (SPM) system. Even though SCC had made huge gains in calculating and managing commission payments in just a few short years through the initial implementation of its SPM tool, it knew that to make the most of its investment, it would need to enhance these gains with continued improvements. With new challenges and changing business conditions, there was still a lot of potential for the SPM system to maximize the ROI.
Partnering with OpenSymmetry, SCC replaced its manual, homegrown systems with Varicent, a robust Sales Performance Management (SPM) solution that not only supported over 300 payees, 50,000 transactions per pay cycle, and Sales Commission dashboards with drill to order line detail, but also gave them deep insights into the sales team’s performance trends. The new SPM system empowered SCC to apply plan changes in a timely manner, shorten the time for calculation processing, and more proactively handle data. It also led to improved reporting and analytics and more accurate forecasting.
In order to maximize its investment in the SPM technology, SCC made the decision to continue its partnership with OpenSymmetry in an advisory role. OpenSymmetry’s Managed Services would provide the strategic oversight and training needed to help SCC reach operational SPM self-sufficiency on a day-to-day basis while providing a designated OpenSymmetry team to call on for support for initiatives such as complex enhancements, best practices for process improvements, and configuration for new dashboards and reports.
“We have a solid support team from OpenSymmetry that knows our business model very well and is able to develop what we need to get us over the next hurdle fairly quickly.” – David Fish, Project Accountant, SCC
The Solution
After the deployment of Varicent for SCC in 2017, the relationship between SCC and OpenSymmetry evolved. Post-deployment support from OpenSymmetry was strong, but this role had to change from making fixes and changes in the system to one of an advisory role for training and empowering the SCC team to do the fixes and changes themselves.
These included:
- Upgrading the Varicent environment to the latest version (V10)
- Performance checks and calculation optimization
- Design review sessions for issue and enhancement implementations
- Documentation and execution of performance improvements
Meeting with SCC one to two times a week, the OpenSymmetry Managed Services team would work with SCC to develop additional wins in the system to improve it and find time savings in different areas, making small changes that would accumulate to large gains in the system as a whole.
“For our business, we need things to move as quickly as possible. Working with OpenSymmetry, we are consistently able to make system improvements to knock off time for different processes in our ICM system.” – David Fish, Project Accountant, SCC
Unlike support from technology vendors, OpenSymmetry Managed Services provided a designated core team of experts that had a deep knowledge of the company’s sales compensation history, pay calculation timeline and process, business model, and sales culture. This meant giving tailored solutions that took the nuances of SCC’s business into account, as well as knowing what kind of process improvements to look for.
The Result
SCC and OpenSymmetry have been in partnership for over four years, and SCC has seen the following improvements from the Managed Services relationship:
- Increased self-sufficiency
- Improved SPM dashboard performance
- Net reduction in processing time despite increased data volume and usage
“The solution, fix, or development is always delivered accurately.” – David Fish, Project Accountant, SCC
In the horizon, SCC will deploy a data purge to streamline its system and further reduce processing time and the need to make manual adjustments whilst working to exploit the new v10 functionality.
