ICM has been worth every Vari-cent!
March 08, 2021
ICM has been worth every Vari-cent!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Varicent Incentive Compensation Management
We use ICM to calculate and pay all non-salary incentive payments, including stock grants, spiff awards, etc. Initially, this was the primary purpose, however, in recent months, we've been trying to figure out how to use more of the reporting functionality to report on and use the 7 years worth of incentive data to perform analytics on our performance based plans and review total compensation.
- Flexibility - We have not run into a compensation plan that we could not build in ICM. Some of our plans are very detailed with complicated formulas.
- Accuracy - ICM is going to calculate accurate payouts every time (assuming the builds are done correctly). We have had some teams run their own calculations in parallel to verify payout amounts. Several times there were discrepancies but in each instance, it was errors on the client side (Excel).
- Reporting Capabilities - While we have only scratched the surface, there seems to be powerful reporting tools build in to ICM. Both from the end user perspective as well as from a management perspective. Reports are easy to build in Presenter and with the addition of Rapid Reports and the Discovery Dashboard, we are looking forward to providing powerful insights into our incentive payouts.
- 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).
- Compliance - with a central system used for calculation incentive payments and commissions, we are able to provide reports and data showing every detail of how payments are calculated and why they are justified. We can also identify anomalies and outliers.
- Integration with our payroll system is seamless. Except for regular pay, nothing goes to payroll without going through ICM. The process for paying incentives/bonuses/commissions is now very structured and efficient.
There hasn't been one time in particular that stands out, but there have been many instances where Varicent has provided timely, quality support. Some examples include refreshing lower environments, setting up Single Sign On (SSO), dealing with system issues, and explaining errors that pop up. In addition, when bugs have been reported, they were prioritized an fixed in a timely manner.
We had several that we looked at but Exactly is the only one I can remember the name. There may have been an ADP solution we considered, but it's been a while.