In this post I will describe what I have seen and my impressions of the Javelin Incentive Manager. When logging in, as could be expected, the user is greeted by some message. From there, the user is able to access the Incentive Manager or many of the other modules I will cover in a separate post.
When selecting “Incentive Manager”, the administrator can see or create a new scenario. The demo was for the on-demand version of the application, so each environment (modeling, development, production, etc) where all located on the same server. These environments are only distinguished by a “scenario”. Xactly also uses this concept of scenario, but it is limited to their modeling environment.
When selecting an existing scenario, the different plans and components are displayed.
All of the plan logic is component-based instead of being rule-based. It seems like most solutions I have seen (except Centive and Merced Systems) follow a rule-based approach: credit rules generate credits, some measurement rules aggregate and transform the credits, and finally the commission rules transforms the credits into a commission amount. Javelin Incentive Manager uses a completely different approach which is based on components and workflows. The plans are built by assembling those components. This component approach appears to be very similar to the Informatica ETL interface.
Each component is reusable from workflow to workflow, and can easily be added and named appropriately.
Selecting a component will show its details, which can be edited on the same screen:
Another feature I liked from Javelin Incentive Manager is the ability to look directly at the output of any component once the results are processed. I’m sure this makes troubleshooting and debugging much easier! The component also shows in a different color of a modification caused the results to be out-of-date – this means it’s time to re-process the batch to get updated results if required.
Quick-Start
Future versions of Javelin Incentive Manager will have a “wizard” called Quick Start to create common workflow structures without even having to add components individually. This feature is already in beta testing. I haven’t actually seen it in action, but it looks good.
More about ZS Javelin Incentive Manager coming in my next post…
