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I almost spilled my coffee this morning when I read that Honeywell was buying Callidus… And then I realized, this is not Callidus Software (the sales performance software vendor) - this is Callidus TECHNOLOGIES (the environmental & combustion experts)! False alert!
With this acquisition, will the “right” Callidus manage to buy the Callidus.com domain name?
Report Creation
Merced Incentive Management has many features to easily create reports and pivot tables. What I found interesting about their reports is its “Access Rights” area which allows us to assign the report to a certain group of payee, but also to only a specific set of users.
Payee Home Page
The payee’s home page includes a section where they can view their statement, analyze it, read bulletins and communications and submit a query (which is how Merced Incentive Management calls dispute resolution.
Bulletins can include any static information, pictures, and information based on performance, contests, etc.
Creating a “Query” is very simple and consists of filling an onine form. Instead of including various fields and functionality which could confuse the payees, this tool uses only 1 text area. Payees can easily track which queries are opened, closed and in progress.
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Payee’s reports
The payee’s reports are also interesting; they contain all the expected information, are fully customizable, the information can be drilled-down, and the sales performance can be displayed in various graph formats. What is particularly interesting is that the administrator can configure various models for any report. These models alter some variables so that the payee can quickly see the impact to their compensation, under various scenarios. For example, they can look at their forecasted annual performance based on their current performance.
ETL
Merced Incentive Management also includes its own ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) suite to transfer data in and out of the application, and transform it as required. Many clients choose to use the convenience of this ETL application, but a third party ETL application such as Informatica or DataStage can also be used.
Plan Communication
Plan communication can also be performed as part of an additional Merced module called the Merced Performance Suite. However this functionality will soon be integrated to the Merced Incentive Management application.
Processing
Merced Incentive Management can support real-time processing if required. Because many source-systems are not updated in real time, daily ‘batches’ can be scheduled. However, this usually does not take too much time, and does not impact access to the system, or the ability to work in it.
This concludes my quick overview of the Merced Incentive Management solution. stay tuned for more application reviews and a few other interesting posts next week.
Calculators
Calculators seem to be the feature where Merced Incentive Management is the most different compared to other solutions. Instead of using “rules” like in Callidus TrueComp and Varicent SPM, or using “components” like ZS Associates Javelin, Merced uses calculators which consist of a multi-dimensional table, very similar to an Excel spreadsheet. Each cell can contain any type of information including formulas referencing other cells. Let’s look at some calculators.
Transaction Calculator
This calculator runs for every transaction that has been identified by the plan. All the transaction fields are available as inputs, and outputs are written back to the transaction itself allowing for per transaction commission and bonus to be generated. An example of this would be an individual sale that is given a percentage commission based on the product sold.
Summary Calculator
This calculator runs once per period per payee and uses aggregated data as inputs such as Total Net Sales, Total Revenue, Total YTD Margin etc. The business rule is calculated after any transaction calculators have run and allows complete control over outputs including overwriting performance and measurement data. An example of this calculator would be a plan that measured the past 6 months average performance and paid based on that average with a cap on the maximum commission that could be earned in a year.
Table Calculator
This calculator is used to store tabular data and information. Table calculators are reference by any of the other calculator types by their reference name. For example the function =PRATES(C1,C2) might pass in a product name and a date to a product table and return a commission rate.
Function Calculator
This calculator is used to encapsulate complex business rules and allows administrators and users to break down large calculations into a series of functions that can be reused.
This should provide a good idea of how Merced Incentive Management handles calculations. Here is a final example of a calculator where some logic is defined:
The next and final post will describe some of the additional features from Merced Incentive Management, including reporting, processing, the payee’s interface and ETL.
During the demo we logged in the application as an administrator. As you can see, the top menu gives access to major application ‘areas’, and the left menu shows information which is relevant to the active area. When we navigated to the “payees” area, we see the “most recently used” payees, and the related areas. Most areas also include a search tool to easily find what we are looking for. Finally, as expected, the payees are listed, grouped by title (which Merced Incentive Management calls “roles”).
Merced Incentive Management supports multiple hierarchies, called “sales structures”. The company hierarchy can be displayed in a graphical way, and “drilled down” as required.
This is when I noticed what I think is one of the best feature of Merced Incentive Management. It uses a “tab” navigation system which we have grown accustomed to in our web browsers, making the navigation from screen to screen (and back) very easy and convenient.
Clicking on a payee opens another tab, displaying that payee’s information.
Some of the information can be modified by updating the values in the text boxes or drown down menus, but others require to pick a value from a list and other settings. For example, changing a role required to specify the new roles with the effective dates for that role. These changes make a window “pop-up” on the screen while fading the information in the background. That was another very nice eye-candy I have not seen in other solutions. This concept of “pop-ups” is used throughout the application.
Building a Plan
Plans in Merced Incentive Management, are not what other applications call a plan. In every other application I have seen, a payee can only be part of ONE plan, and the plan consists of all the rules including commissions and bonuses for the payees assigned to the plan.
In Merced, a plan is an object which contains all the logic to come up with a set of results, multiple plans are assigned to each payee. So for example, if we have 4 different bonuses for an individual, each of those bonuses is considered a plan. The first time I talked with Merced about their application, they mentioned the application supported several thousands of plans for some clients. I did not understand why a sane (or even an insane) client would want that many plans. This explains it.
If it’s still not clear, I hope it will make sense after I explain how the plans perform calculations.
Back to the plan screen; the screen is divided in a few sections. The “plan summary” section shows the plan name, the plan group, the target and the effective dates. The plan filter section shows specifies the data source and every filter applied to that data. Finally, the bulk of the logic takes place in the “plan calculation” section, using what Merced Incentive Compensation calls “calculators”.
Each plan (as is every other object in Merced Incentive Management) is effective dated. A full audit trail allows to audit the various object versions and revert back to a previous version if required.
My next post will focus on the ‘calculators’ which contain the logic for all calculations performed my Merced Incentive Management.
Merced Systems is another company which is probably lesser known in the North American market for the moment compared to other product vendors. I first wrote about Merced when they acquired an incentive compensation management software company called Practique Software. Just like ZS Associates’ Javelin Suite, this “new” SPM vendor (with a solution called INCA) caught me by surprise because I hadn’t heard about it before. If you also wonder why the name may not sound familiar, it’s because Practique Software’s INCA solution was mostly used everywhere, except in North America. This is what Merced Systems is changing.
Practique has been deploying INCA in many enterprise environments in Europe for the past 12 years. So while they are a new player in North America they are certainly not new to the ICM market. Practique Associates is going to keep its brand name for the moment in Europe, but in North America its applications were already rebranded as Merced Incentive Management.
Merced Incentive Management is another web-based SPM solution with a very different approach than what I have seen with many other vendors. We will see how some of its features are quite innovative. The application is targeted towards enterprises with a large number of payees. Merced Incentive Management is an enterprise class incentive management application with multiple deployments of more than 10,000 and up to 100,000 payees with an excess of 1 million transactions per day. It is available both on-demand and on-premise, and it is also easy to switch between on-demand and on-premise if required.
In the next 2-3 posts I will focus on Merced Incentive Management, which is a great addition to other Merced offerings including applications facilitating organizational goals alignment, goal setting, performance reporting and coaching.
I try to make my blog as independent as possible from my job. I try to share some knowledge about the compensation management industry, various SPM vendors, best practices, etc. However, sometimes there is a fine line between both, since they are so closely related. This is one of those times I will cross the line and blur this distinction, to promote an event hosted by OpenSymmetry. Why am I promoting this event? Because the event is free, because it’s directly related to what I believe you care about, and because my boss said that if I didn’t… I’m joking.
“We” are hosting a series of webinars where leading sales performance management solutions will be demonstrated in an anonymous setting.
Participants of the webinars will learn about:– Which functionality are offered by each sales performance management solution– What key characteristics distinguishes solutions from each other– Under which conditions and requirements are the solutions expected to provided the best value– How compensation plans can be configured and maintained within each solution– Which other important features such as reporting and modeling are available with each tool
Ok… So I *know* how many readers I get on this blog every day. I also *know* that many come to this blog to read what I have to say about the various solutions. And finally, I *know* that not even half of my readers signed up for these webinars. Maybe this is because I’m doing a too good job at reviewing the applications here, and that you feel you don’t need to see them, but I’m telling you, seeing the systems in action is what is really needed to truly appreciate what they can do.
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