LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

My entry on Offshoring SPM Communication Challenges was featured in Arcadia Solution’s quarterly newsletter.  Arcadia Solutions is a business and technology consulting firm with a division focused on incentive compensation solutions. Their newsletter also has 2 good articles:

The first article is called “On-Demand vs. On-Premise - What works for you“.  Arcadia identified 3 key issues which drive this decision: comp plan complexity, technological capacity and data integration complexity. 

To this list, as I talked before a few times on this blog, I would add a few more drivers: the cost structure (subscription fee per person per month for on-demand rather than a larger upfront fee, the number of participants, and the number of transactions (on-premise applications can usually handle a bigger load).  On-demand (also called Software-as-a-Service SAAS) offers many other benefits such as generally quicker to go live and easier to implement, frequent automatic updates and lower operating costs.  On-premise SPM solutions can offer more integration flexibility, and more control (such as direct access to the database which is usually not the case with on-demand solutions). 

The second article is “Build vs. Buy - How do I Decide What’s Best for my Unique Business” and discusses some of the pros and cons of buying a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software versus building  a custom system. 

This is something I have not written about, mostly because I didn’t think it was a question companies were still asking themselves, with so many mature COTS solutions available.  Unless there is a need to perform something that a COTS application cannot do, there should be no reason to build a custom application.  If there is something an ICM COTS cannot do, it might be time to review your comp plans!