Unifying Sales Performance Management Across Departments
One interface for AXA Hungary’s Business & IT systems
-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.
“OpenSymmetry have delivered a strategic platform that provides centralized administration and reward management of all sale channels. Achieving this in the tight timeline was possible because of a strong team effort from all involved”
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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