Fast and effective incentive compensation management for Telco

Industry: Telecommunications

Since 2007, OpenSymmetry has been a trusted incentive compensation management (ICM) partner for Vodacom, a leading African communications company. From the first ICM implementation to ongoing support services and business expansion, the partnership between OpenSymmetry and Vodacom demonstrates longstanding trust and consistently delivered value over time. Through the years, the mutual familiarity meant meeting business needs over time without having to reintroduce the company culture or business priorities when new challenges arose.

The beginning of Vodacom’s ICM journey

Vodacom’s journey to transform their incentive programmes began with the challenge of managing commissions for dealers and enterprise sellers using a combination of bespoke systems and spreadsheets. This led to both a lack of auditability for compliance standards as well as a lack of motivation for dealers and sellers who could not clearly obtain their pay and performance information. With a highly competitive Telco environment in South Africa, Vodacom knew they needed some changes in order to maintain dealer satisfaction and deliver the best dealer experience.

Vodacom began with an extensive evaluation of the marketplace and chose CallidusCloud (now SAP) as the best-fit vendor due to their proven success and scalability for the Telco industry. After some initial implementation challenges, OpenSymmetry was engaged to resolve critical issues and take over the implementation process. The initial phase focused on automation of the commissions process, including parallel testing of the system to ensure accuracy. During this project, the end-to-end processing time for commissions was reduced from over 36 hours to approximately 18 hours, and the project was delivered on time and on budget.

Vodacom’s journey with OS over the years

Since the start of their ICM journey in 2007 with their retail channel, Vodacom has continued to expand the ICM system to process commissions for their remaining sales teams and to enhance end user experience for system users.

In 2010, they introduced the new ICM system to the enterprise business unit and continued expansion to other business units through 2022.

In 2019, Vodacom moved from an on-premises deployment to SAP Commissions cloud solution. This brought the benefits of lower IT overhead, further improvements in processing times, and access to new and extended functionality.

Building on this new functionality in 2020, Vodacom expanded the system to their internal sales population where they were further able to realise the benefits of automated dispute workflow and forecasts on an individual level. Bringing all commissions plans and data together has enabled Vodacom to standardise business rules and improved performance visibility for sales reps, managers and execs.

Due to continuous improvement, commissions processing time has further been reduced to just one hour.

Benefits realised by Vodacom

Vodacom’s optimised ICM system has resulted in the following benefits:

• High visibility: Incentive compensation data is now housed in a highly accessible central reporting dashboard so that sales reps, managers, and executives can make quicker business decisions.
• Accurate reports: Sales data is fully integrated with billing, CRM, and HR for accurate reports.
• Increased efficiency: Automation of commission and bonus reward calculations from source data to reports and invoices frees administrators to have more time to analyse results.
• Centralised system: Multi-business unit deployment and processing of commissions for external dealers and internal employees are all on a single system.
• Complete auditability: With commission and bonus reward data tracked and measured automatically, Vodacom has no issues with compliance and is always ready to provide needed information.
• Increased dealer and enterprise seller satisfaction: Online self-billing invoices have supporting reports and details for full visibility of performance and streamlined workflow so that dealers and enterprise sellers can be more productive and have greater confidence.

New ICM opportunities for Vodacom

The latest system enhancement opportunities are continued business expansions and systematic management of account alignment, to assist in the quota setting process using the SAP T&Q Management module.

With over 18 million transactions per month and 20,500 payees, Vodacom continues to process huge volumes of data through OpenSymmetry’s ongoing support services, all on a single system.

If you want to optimise your ICM process, are considering investing in ICM technology, or looking for ways to get more out of your current technology solution, OpenSymmetry can help.

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ABOUT VODACOM
Vodacom is a leading African communications company providing a wide range of communication services, including mobile voice, messaging, data, financial and converged services to over 109 million (including Safaricom) customers. With roots in South Africa, Vodacom’s mobile network business includes operations in Tanzania, the DRC, Mozambique, Lesotho and Kenya, covering a population of over 284 million people.