Fast and effective incentive compensation management for Telco
Vodacom’s journey to automated ICM processes and self-sufficiency over a decade of partnership
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.
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About Us
OpenSymmetry enables clients to achieve greater operational efficiency and get better sales results. We are a global consulting company specializing in the planning, implementation, and optimization of industry leading technology suppliers of sales performance management solutions.
CONSIDERATIONS WHEN REPLACING YOUR SPM TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION
Understanding the challenges companies face when migrating Sales Performance Management (SPM) technology solutions can be a significant undertaking. This paper is designed to provide high-level guidance to stakeholders who carry this responsibility. As OpenSymmetry has helped many companies evaluate and effectively migrate to new technology solutions, we are sharing seven key areas that we find critical to completing this kind of effort.
1. CURRENT STATE ASSESSMENT & FUTURE STATE PLANNING
A critical initial step before migrating to a new SPM solution is understanding how well your current program is performing across people, processes, and technology. From there you can devise a future state vision for how your SPM program should operate. By understanding both current state gaps and what your future state needs look like, you can effectively begin defining requirements while also clearly articulating success criteria. It’s important to recognize that your previous or initial SPM implementation may not have gathered all necessary processes/requirements, so it’s vital to take a fresh, holistic view in this first step.
2. DATA INTEGRATION
One of the most complex and time-consuming requirements is determining how to best leverage current source data feeds to support the new platform. Within the context of your current state assessment and future state planning, the team should review what their reporting, analytics, and any future state compensation elements needs are to ensure a meaningful inventory of data requirements are defined. SPM solutions vary in terms of how data is gathered, translated, and uploaded into the system. Some solution applications may have a standardized format requiring additional configuration, whereas others may have the ability of data field mapping, which provides additional flexibility. The ability to own the data translation from your source systems to the SPM platform is key. Another focus point is to ensure that you evaluate all manual feeds to incorporate automation, as well as any additional error validation processes.
3. HISTORICAL DATA
Migrating historical data is an often-overlooked requirement when moving from one SPM platform to another. To keep costs down and minimize complexity, clients may want to ID only the data that is needed to ensure ongoing management of comp (e.g. payment history) and then transfer detail-level data into data storage to be referenced at a future date. It is important to consider what historical data is needed for the new system for reference on future payments
4. PROCESS IMPROVEMENT
Each SPM solution may require users to interact with the system in different ways. This area may need additional attention, especially as it has the potential to improve processes currently employed to manage sales compensation. Understanding the impact a new system will have on current processes, as well as those who manage the processes, is critical to ensuring a successful launch and ongoing management of core processes. As an example, two of the leading solutions in the market have very different expectations regarding the skills users need to possess to effectively maintain compensation plans and reports and, in some cases, execute the day-to-day activities. Defining expectations of your staff related to the new technology, prior to the project, will ideally give your organization the necessary time to introduce training that ensures effective ongoing management of the program.
5. WORKFLOW
SPM solutions vary widely in their ability to support automated workflow. As a result, there are significant challenges for sales compensation teams related to an SPM migration. Capabilities can range from templates to existing documentation, levels of routing, and even implementation of a stopgap for a payee to accept plan documentation prior to payout. Within the context of your future state definition, capturing and defining areas where automated workflows can be leveraged is a necessary part of the core requirements. Before a new system is deployed, it is important to map these processes out to drive user adoption, leverage the SPM system as an auditable repository, and minimize email management.
6. REPORTING & ANALYTICS
It is critical to develop a holistic vision of information distribution to the various stakeholders and tools used to deliver this content (i.e. static pages vs. dashboards). Similar to workflows, different vendors have various capabilities related to reporting for the end users. Assessing these capabilities against your business requirements is imperative to the success of the roll-out. For example, some vendors require more robust configurations in the system (e.g. crediting logic) to enable specific analytics capabilities, while some solutions, architected specifically for reporting and analytics, have much more robust capabilities. Another area for consideration is the use of the vendor’s reporting solution against your in-house technology stack. Some solutions make it easy to port data into new environments, which could be a consideration in helping to keep the number of reporting tools requiring management to a minimum.
7. DEPLOYMENT
The implementation of a new solution should be designed to minimize the impact on payees and managers. One of the most critical aspects of your effort is assessing how all stakeholders will be impacted and how to mitigate any disruption. It is important to identify upcoming changes for your sales organization, administrators, and other internal partners with a plan in place to offer the steps needed to ensure the best chances for solution adoption.
The first step when considering a new SPM platform is an assessment of your current program and the development of a future state vision. OpenSymmetry offers a no-cost workshop to help you gain an understanding of how your current SPM program performs against your needs and industry best practices, as well as a readout on current solutions in the market.
Leveraging the OpenSymmetry assessment methodology and knowledge of the leading SPM providers, you will be equipped with:
• A current state analysis scorecard
• The framework for a business case to support change
• Contemporary intel on the SPM market and SPM vendor capabilities
• High-level deployment and license cost estimates