LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

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.