Jedox is a Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management solution. According to the vendor, their solution’s unified planning, analysis and reporting empowers decision makers from finance, sales, purchasing and marketing. Additionally, the vendor says this solution helps business users work smarter, streamline business collaboration, and make insight-based decisions with confidence. The vendor also says 1,900 organizations in 127 countries are using Jedox for real-time planning…
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Varicent Incentive Compensation Management
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Varicent (formerly IBM Cognos Incentive Compensation Management, or IBM Sales Performance Management) is presented by the newly reformed vendor as a Sales Performance Management (SPM) Solution that will accurately track, manage and report on sales-related data and processes to reduce administrative costs and provide insight into key performance metrics. The solution encompasses Incentive Compensation Management, Territory Management, Quota Planning and Channel Management.
Varicent was acquired…
Best suited for financial consolidation and / or as a highly customized and compact EPM / BI solution (up to 100 CCU) with individual workflows, planning and reporting functionalities, with moderate number of users (no restrictions for any industry, all industries are covered well). It also has advanced reporting & data analysis requirements and provides an integration and reporting layer of imported data from different external systems (via ETL). It can help with migrating your legacy Excel-based business models to the Web. It is not well suited for Enterprise BI applications with expecting >500 CCU (users at the same time working with the system) - this may cause serious performance issues, as all data is kept in RAM. Jedox is also less suited for applications with heavy document management requirements (document management is not an out of the box functionality in Jedox and rather requires custom development through custom widgets etc.).
Varicent is well suited across all the domains (Finance, Insurance, Hi-Tech etc.) for sales incentive calculation. It can tackle the difficult scenarios/conditions provided by the client. This tool may not or should not be used in incentive forecasting. It's not a planning tool. Small scenario modeling can be done here but not on a large scale.
Diversity. Jedox can be applied to many different use cases from small to large deployments and from budgeting to enterprise class BI solutions. But rarely is one tool able to fulfill all of these requirements in one organisation. This value proposition can be complicated for prospective users.
Awareness. Jedox punches above its weight in capability and scalability, but not enough people have heard about it and therefore procurement processes can be drawn out as a result.
Zions Bancorporation takes security very seriously. While we have NOT had any security issues with ICM, with it being a cloud application, our internal infosec team really wants some kind of MFA (multi factor authentication) support for off corporate network access.
The ICM internal workflow manager is not as flexible as we would like. For what it does, it works extremely well. However, for our purposes, it would not fit our process so we created our own workflows using presenter reports, scheduler and automated data imports. We'd love to be able to use the internal workflow and I think with recent improvements we're getting close but it's just not there yet.
In order to send emails to users (ie. payments need approval) we had to write an external python script. It works well but for most admins, they are not able to support it. It would be nice to have the ability to send emails based on defined triggers. The built in workflow can do this but as mentioned previously, we are not able to use it.
I'd like to have the ability to run a partial calculation. Currently, there is only an option to run a full system calc or a single calculation. I would like the ability to run a stream of calcs (ie. from a parent down to all children only).
Customer support from IBM is impeccable. They are quick to respond and they don't nickel and dime you for every request you make. Their goal is to ensure your success and as a user, I really feel like they listen to my concerns. That's not to say there are no problems. All software has its issues, but I don't feel like those issues fall on deaf ears.
To me Jedox deserves 10/10 because it is a consistent one-in-all platform with a modern look and feel. It is intuitive to use and allows you to make intuitive applications integrating traditional business intelligence with performance management functionality. It certainly has a short learning curve, especially for those that are familiar with MS Excel. An example: I've lost count but Jedox it is available in more than 25 languages. Another: Jedox does not require programming skills... it is developed to be used by the business.
It was extremely difficult to create reports. We had to download data and create them in other applications. This was very limiting and required a great deal of time and effort. Drag and drop functionality is needed so we can self serve in the product.
Jedox has very few bugs. Reports are available through an Excel add-in, the web and/or mobile device (IOS/Android). In my opinion, availability also means high performance, not having to wait for the system to give you the required reports, analysis, dashboards instantly.
All is fast, but with API's it is sometimes slower due to the application we are pulling data from. Reports are loaded directly or within seconds and our reports are very detailed with many columns and rows.
Jedox support in general is a professional and fast responding team. An easy-to-use ticketing system is in place. Bug-related questions are solved fast (responses come usually in a few hours after the question), but some questions / tickets, that are not Jedox-related bugs (for example some advanced questions about Jedox functionality), may be forwarded to Application Management team for further processing and then it may take several days or even weeks to get a response here -> there is room for improvement here.
Giving a 10 would suggest there is no room for improvement. I don't feel like their support is perfect. However, I have never met another team that was more dedicated to making sure we get what we want and need.
The implementation of SSO, SAML Authentication, HTTPS, Server splitting (Frontend / Backend servers) could be more standardized and made more user friendly to set up (e.g. via setup guide). Otherwise the implementation of Jedox is quick and simple when compared to other similar technologies.
Test test test. Make sure that the product is calculating everyone 100% correctly. DO NOT accept a 70% pass rate as some companies would like to have you believe is acceptable. This means conducting thorough testing by providing 100% of all expected results, but it will be worth it when you know that the compensation plans are working entirely as expected.
Calumo is similar product to Jedox. I have used it extensively in my previous role. It was a major contender when we evaluated a BI platform for NIDA. Calumo is a great product as well and it was a very close call. Where we found Jedox to be a better fit for NIDA was the ability to prepare dynamic reports with ease without the need to learn MDX which was used extensively by Calumo to make dynamic reports which expand or shrink based on the underlying data. Another major benefit we saw in Jedox was the whole ETL process could be managed within Jedox instead of doing it in SQL server which negates having a dedicated SQL specialist role when the scale expands.
Out of all of the products I have ever evaluated for this space, Varicent is head and shoulders above the rest in my opinion. For me, I think of Varicent as akin to building an Access database while the other programs are like building an Excel data model. In Varicent you control everything from what tables are built to how they are leveraged with the calculations that you build. In the other tools, you are pushed into finding ways to leverage their pre-built mechanism of action and any deviation from what you build necessitates you to build a brand new plan. This is the key differentiator of a table driven system as opposed to a rule based one. The flexibility and usability is wholly unmatched.
Scalability is often another word for speed. Given enough data, enough users or enough calculations, the tool becomes slower and slower. You will find that Jedox has a very high performance that can even be increased by the use of grafical cards. Other thaen that it does not only offer BI (looking back based on historical ERP data) but also allows you to look forward through integrated budgetting, planning, forecasting, workflow and collaboration. Not easy to find a tool that can support so much business functionality. So, also pretty scalable in that respect.
Varicent Incentive Compensation Management is a tool that allows [users] to implement the specific rules applying to the business, [without] any technical constraints from the tool. The reports would, however, need to be a little bit less rigid and add more controls regarding what has been entered by users.
Financial budgeting and Forecasting are done in a centralized fashion in Jedox now instead of a decentralized excel based approach. A lot of cost savings and improved reliability
Easy to use self-help Dashboards and detailed reports
Fewer calculation errors as previous solution was manual based.
Ability to build tailored solutions in ICM to entice Brokers to write business for ANZ.
Allows the Broker Managers to easily to see what commissions they are going to pay in the next Commission Run payment cycle and make changes if required.
