Tag: spm

IBM Vision 2015

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending IBM Vision 2015 at the Hilton Bonnet Creek in Florida. Perficient was a sponsor of the event. This was my first time attending IBM Vision, I have been to a number of the other IBM conferences, and I came away impressed. Unlike massive events such as Insight and IOD, Vision is quite small and intimate. At Vision, it is easy to interact with attendees and presenters and to get around to see all the exhibitors. It was great to be able to check back in with people to see what sessions they had enjoyed. This year, IBM Vision had five tracks into which the material was collected:

  • Financial and operational performance management
  • Sales performance management (SPM)
  • Financial close and disclosure management
  • Governance, risk, and compliance
  • Cloud based solutions for business insight

I chose to concentrate on presentations in the Sales Performance Management track.

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Implementing Cognos ICM at Perficient

The Bait by nist6dh, on Flickr
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License   by  nist6dh 

Defining the Problem

For any growing organization, with a good size sales team compensated through incentives for deals and revenue, calculating payments becomes a bigger and bigger challenge. Like many organizations, Perficient handled this problem with Excel spreadsheets, long-hours, and Excedrin. Our sales team is close to a hundred strong and growing 10% each year. To help reward activities aligned to our business goals and spur sales that move the company in its strategic direction, the Perficient sales plans are becoming more granular and targeted. Our propensity to acquire new companies jolts the sales teams size and introduces new plans, products, customers, and territories. With Excel, it is almost impossible, without a Herculean effort, to identify whether prior plan changes had the desired effect or what plan changes might cost. With, literally, hundreds of spreadsheets being produced each month the opportunity to introduce errors is significant. Consequently, executives, general managers, sales directors, business developers, and accountants spend hundreds if not thousands of hours each month validating, checking, and correcting problems. The risks involved in using Excel are significant, with an increased likelihood of rising costs for no benefit, and limited ability to model alternative compensation scenarios.  Continue reading “Implementing Cognos ICM at Perficient”