Here is my latest Incentive Compensation Management application review. This week I am reviewing a relatively unknown (in North America) solution called Excentive Incentive Management. Excentive was incorporated in 2002. Since then, they have gained a lot of popularity in France and have signed major clients such as Canon, Orange, and Air France. Earlier this year, they raised 700,000 Euros ($880,000 US) to accelerate international growth, part of over $1 million raised in recent months to fuel global expansion.
They also assembled an additional team driven by 10 seasoned managers active in the globalization of companies such as SAP, Hyperion, and OutlookSoft. One of their key target markets is of course North America, so we may soon start seeing some Excentive implementations over here if they can overcome some major challenges ahead, namely convincing prospective clients that they have the capability to deliver and support their implementations in the US, and that they are financially stable.
What is particularly interesting about the Excentive solution is that it includes performance management modules in addition to the sales performance solution. It makes it easy to compensate employees based on MBO campaigns. It’s a very flexible solution which can be a good option for as few as 50 payees, to as many as 50,000 payees, and it can be deployed on-premise or hosted. Excentive Incentive Management is deployed across industries, and some implementations can process as many as 2 million transactions daily.
From the “regular” employee perspective, the application mostly consists of a repository of reports. These reports can be configured and customized by an administrator, but standard reports exist for most common information such as commission statements and performance review results.
Employees can also see the details of their compensation plans and can easily find out which commission was paid and find out if any transactions are missing.
Managers have access to additional information such as their team’s performance, salaries, etc.
Managers can also consult their employee’s records containing information about their past performance such as commissions earned in previous periods.
In addition to reports, managers can edit some of their team’s information including new salary figures, bonus values, based on constraints configured by the administrators.
One of the biggest features for managers is to be able to provide rating for their employees’ performance and to reuse all that info in a salary review process or a stock option allocation exercise, which are also supported by Excentive.
Finally, let’s look at some of the configuration of the solution, from the administrator’s perspective.
“Campaigns”, or the performance management component, can be configured in a few clicks from the campaigns menu.
Bonus and commission rules can be configured easily in a 3-step process. First, the properties of the rule are setup which includes the name of the rule and the dates for which it is effective. The rules engine can thus access the quantitative data (eg. sales by product/territory/period , margins, etc) as well as the quantitative performance indicators (eg. team spirit, customer loyalty, etc). This allows the calculation of the incentive (commission) as well as the bonus. Rules can be used for the classic earnings calculations as well as for recommendations and simulations.
The criteria step consists of specifying the conditions which must be met for the commission to fire.
This formula can be typed in, or created by clicking on the functions and other information stored in the database.
The resulting calculation is configured in the same way as the condition.
The reports we have looked at so far were all numbers presented in a tabular format, but it’s also possible to integrate visual elements to dashboards and reports.
Excentive’s solution also includes integrated modules to perform more complex tasks:
- Hierarchy Manager: combine different dimensions such as region/office/people into multiple hierarchies necessary for workflow and approval processes.
- Pool Manager: create teams and delegate ‘people-to-team’ assignments to local managers.
- Mobility Manager: spot team changes and transfer people between departments/managers. Manage partial, time and team depending compensations
- Culture Manager associate people with language, currency, location
- Environment Manager which is a secure and fast way to move an application change from a development environment towards a test or production environment
Overall, Excentive is a slick web based application which shows a lot of promise if they can inspire enough trust from prospective clients. Since all modules are integrated in one solution at no additional cost, Excentive could be a good play for clients looking for not only incentive compensation management, but the entire spectrum of salary and performance management. Now could be a good time to negotiate a favorable price from the vendor, given that they are aggressively trying to enter this North American market.
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