Unifying Sales Performance Management Across Departments

-Industry: Financial Services

Challenge:

AXA Hungary embarked on a major journey

The ultimate goal was to become “one AXA” for their internal and external sales channels. The existing sales channel management was disjointed, with the core data being distributed across several non-compatible systems. AXA Hungary wanted a single, regulatory-compliant platform to make basic sales information and commission & bonus calculations highly visible and accessible.

The new solution would ideally do the following within one interface:

• Control sales partner data
• Manage all commission and bonus reward calculations
• Deliver web-based reports to the sales force, management, and back office

The software platform would also need to be adopted as a standard for the group. AXA appointed OpenSymmetry as their delivery partner to implement the chosen software suite. OpenSymmetry was ultimately selected for a number of key reasons:

• They had deep domain and software knowledge.
• Multiple concurrent implementations were possible with OpenSymmetry having the largest pool of consultants with specialized experience.
• A demonstrated willingness to develop a core consulting team and delivery model for all AXA companies.
• The ability to develop a regional system architecture COE (Center Of Excellence).

Solution:

The Implementation

The implementation was split into two distinct phases. The key goal of phase 1 was to deliver the sales partner management and AXA Bank products. Phase 2 then delivered life insurance, pension and health fund commission payments for the external sales and franchise channels onto the platform.

For phase 1, AXA Hungary set a demanding five-month delivery schedule that OpenSymmetry met by using their established toolkit and proven methodology, commencing with an intensive series of requirement analysis workshops to devise a detailed solution document and project plan. Following a transition period to business-as-usual operation, an implementation review was completed to support the planning for phase 2. All output from this study was incorporated into the phase 2 project, which was subsequently delivered on target within five months. The overall scope of the project included:

• Administering to 8,000+ sales entities including sales partner managers and internal & external sales channels
• Connecting transactional data feeds from the four core source systems: life, pension, health and bank
• Seamlessly synchronizing agent data between five operational systems
• Creating 14 web reports delivered on a portal
• Reviewing and updating 11 compensation plans

At all stages of the implementation, solution architecture time was built into the project plan to ensure that development standards were met.

There were many challenges to overcome along the way. Most notably, the sales partner data required a lot of analysis and data quality transformation to integrate it seamlessly into the SPM solution. In many cases the external agent data was incomplete, not having the required structural information. For example, manager IDs and effective date ranges were often incomplete or missing. Merging data from multiple disparate source systems was challenging for these reasons, but ultimately the dedication of the joint AXA and OpenSymmetry team resulted in a successful outcome.

Adapting the SPM solution to meet the business process, user access and screen layout requirements also presented a significant challenge to the team. Many iterations of the product configuration were necessary in an evolutionary process to ensure that the final solution was fit for the required purpose.

Implementation Review

After completing the first phase of the project, AXA and OpenSymmetry conducted an implementation review to ensure that lessons could be learned from the project experience up to that point, allowing improvements and efficiency gains to be made during future release cycles.

Product Migration

The migration to production took place over a single weekend by the joint OpenSymmetry/AXA team. This involved code changes to all the other core systems being launched in parallel with the platform release. Having performed a “dry run” prior to the launch weekend, most issues encountered at go-live were addressed very quickly. AXA also ensured that system users were available on Sunday to test the migration. This resulted in a successful launch and no downtime experienced within the sales network.

Benefits:

Many benefits have been delivered to AXA Hungary as a result of the system launch. Most notably:

• Reduced administration overhead through automating many manual processes related to sales partner management and commission payment cycles
• Quicker onboarding process and significantly improved data quality of new sales partners
• Capability for communication to all sales partners through web portal and real-time reporting
• Reduced total cost of ownership of sales channel commission and bonus payment processes using a centralized system
• Improved sales partner experience were met

Since project completion, the AXA business team is fully self-sufficient in all aspects of day-to-day and monthly operations.

For more information on how OpenSymmetry can help your organization improve its SPM program, please email us at os_info@www.opensymmetry.com.

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ABOUT AXA
The AXA Group is a worldwide leader in insurance and asset management, with 160,000 employees serving 105 million clients in 62 countries.