Item: Varicent
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Varicent Incentive Compensation Management is used to calculate, output, and present variable earnings for our sales force. This spans the sales and account management organization plus some additional teams. It addresses the need for a tool to deliver incentive compensation for employees on a commission/bonus scheme.

Pros and Cons

Entirely flexible capability that can address almost all business logic
Powerful calculation engine able to process a huge volume of data
Robust and secure cloud-based technology
New analytical and AI-based tools
Positive services and support experience

Integration to other systems such as HR, sales, and DW
Mobile capability
Out-of-the-box workflow-based capability

Return on Investment

Managed accurate payout throughout significant company transition
Improved focus on key business objectives such as revenue and retention
Simplified the IT architectural landscape and delivery process
Less progress on forecasting, modeling, and managing payout vs. performance

Usability

For an end user, this very much depends on how the web client, reports, and workflow have been structured; with the new sales portal and report options, this is rapidly becoming easier and/or more productive to use.

For the admin client, there is a high learning curve and it demands considerable skill to build and maintain the model; having said that, designed wisely, it can be immensely flexible and powerful in delivering the exact requirements of the business.

Exceptional Examples of Varicent Support

New "ask the expert" option is allowing us to build faster and better (e.g. using workflow conditional logic more effectively).

During upgrade to the new v10, where future upgrades are automated, the services and cloud team worked together with ours in an agile and extremely positive partnership to deliver improved performance across the board, with strong design principles to enable us to maintain performance and stability, deliver change more quickly ("calculate once, use often"), and reduce technical debt.

Scalability

It's in the nature of the core product to configure and scale to the needs of the organization--essentially to ingest data from multiple sources (internal and external) build the data transformation logic to whatever degree is required, then to publish the resulting data to the end user in the form of reports, web forms, files, etc.

Alternatives Considered

We have looked at Synergy, Callidus, Xactly, and one or two others, but that was some time ago.

Other Software Used

Salesforce.com, QlikView, Microsoft SQL Server

Likelihood to Recommend

Suited to environments where commission schemes are complex and frequently changing with multiple variables, where the sales force is global, where SaaS model works better, where continuously-delivered updates and upgrades in a fast-moving business are the norm.

Conversely it could be recommended less in an environment where the schemes are fairly simple and static, where there is a small volume of users or data, where a local and perhaps non-hosted implementation is preferred.

Powerful ICM that keeps getting better

Overall Satisfaction with Varicent Incentive Compensation Management