What Makes Incentives and Compensation So Tricky?
P.J. Jakovljevic - November 29, 2006

Managing incentive compensation presents challenges to almost every large and midsized company, due to the complex nature of the calculations. Such calculations might involve determining whether the sales plan is to pay on profit, or rather pay on market share; whether it involves multiple payees per transaction, etc. Other considerations include the high levels of security required (owing to the numerous and diverse authorization levels, and the fact that data feeds are coming from many external data sources), and the dynamic nature of the sales environment that imposes the need for visibility of millions of report pages per week containing all pertinent sales, customer, and corporate data. Further complicating these considerations are intensive integration of divisions, legacy systems, upstream and downstream connections, and so on. Last but not least, there are also people issues to manage, such as disputes, approvals, reorganizations, and self-service capabilities...