BONUSES
BT Business teams up with Practique to deliver new bonus management system for its sales staff
Bonus payments are an integral part of any sales team. But for a company the size of BT Business the idea of creating bonus plans for a range of 40,000 products and 2,000 employees proved to be a tough challenge. So it turned to UK-based Practique Associates, a provider of incentive compensation management products, to create a bonus environment in which it could help boost both staff morale and sales productivity.
Problems with existing processes
BT Business needed to address its bonus management processes because existing methods for calculating and managing bonus payments were struggling to cope with increasing levels of complexity.
"We take orders for a range of 40,000 products and there are 30 different variants on bonuses to sales staff who sell these products. We needed to work out everything using the old system, from raw data to bonus payments and the application just couldn't cope," said Phil Goodall, BT's transformation data manager.
The company needed an application that could not only manage bonus payments more efficiently but also enable it to realise strategic benefits from improved productivity. Ultimately the company was looking for improved bonus scheme modelling capabilities as well as comprehensive reporting tools on which it could base sales analysis.
New compensation management system
BT said it chose an incentive compensation management product called INCA from Practique Associates because it could offer all of the above, had a quick return on investment and could be deployed rapidly.
"We identified considerable cost savings in our maintenance overhead and in other areas such as cutting down on shadow accounting and eliminating overpayment of bonuses to staff," comments Goodall.
According to Goodall, the new bonus management processes have achieved two things:
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BT Business is a division of BT Retail, providing everything from traditional telephony services and mobile technology to internet access and web-based services, through to help and advice on how to develop a full-blown e-business strategy. Its customers range from start-ups and so-called micro businesses , to medium sized businesses with between 250 and 500 employees. BT Business currently has 1.2 million customers.
Practique Associates aims to help customers achieve "operational efficiency, commission cost control and measurement". Its software has been "designed to eradicate the inefficiencies and inaccuracies typically associated with home-grown solutions. The combination of open architecture and proven deployment methodology delivers fast, measurable ROI and significant productivity gains."