Streamlining compensation program with IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules BRMS
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- Brazil
Product
- IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules business rule management system
Tech Stack
- IBM WebSphere
- ILOG JRules
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Employee Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Human Resources
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
The customer is a large Brazilian retailer of durable goods. The company has grown to be one of Brazil’s largest durable goods retail chains with 613 stores nationwide. With gross revenues of R$5.7 billion and EBITDA of R$320 million in 2010, the retailer has 21 thousand employees serving 23 million customers. The retail outlets are catalog stores, where sales representatives use computers to display and sell the company’s goods. About 30 percent of sales representatives’ monthly paycheck is flat salary, and the other 70 percent is commission and bonuses.
The Challenge
The Brazilian retailer had a business-critical incentive compensation system that had 60 rules for calculating bonuses, and provided little flexibility in product promotion. The monthly processing time took 12 - 18 hours causing a rush to meet the payroll deadline. The compensation system was a 15-year-old COBOL program with very little documentation that depended on a single systems analyst to keep it running. There was a two-day window at the end of each month to collect and process all store transactions in order to determine incentive compensation. If a problem appeared, such as an unexpected or erroneous transaction volume or money value, the IT team would work around the clock to make adjustments and reprocess batches. Making timely updates to the compensation plan to meet constantly changing business needs was a challenge.
The Solution
The company implemented IBM® WebSphere® ILOG® JRules business rule management system to create a flexible, easy-to-manage incentive compensation system. The ILOG JRules solution processes all the transactions for each day and the previous days, running all 60 business rules, to keep a running total of commissions and to determine how bonuses are progressing against monthly goals. The processing for each day takes only 55 minutes, and there’s no longer any rush at the end of the month to meet a two-day window, because the work has been broken up into 30 daily parts. The JRules solution brings unprecedented transparency to the compensation program, saves time, boosts satisfaction for employees and reassures management that written policies are being observed across the board.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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