“By working very closely with the business leaders of the Company, a team of Business Analysts from Belatrix was able to fully document the existing compensation plan of the Company.”

The Company. The Client is a company situated in Germany and with operations in over 22 countries. The Company sells different beauty and personal care products through its network of over 120 thousand independent distributors worldwide.

The Challenge. One of the main systems for any direct sales company is its commissions system, which is used to calculate the compensation of its independent distributors. The Client was experiencing the pain derived from using an old commissions system based on AS-400 technology which was showing its age. Such system presented the following challenges:

• Written in RPG, no one in the Company could effectively maintain it.
• The system was so complex that adding new markets was a challenge.
• The data storage was antique thus presenting several challenges when decision-support data was needed.
• It needed a full blown staff of over 5 people fully dedicated to manipulate, check and feed the data.
• The design was so rigid that new bonuses or benefits could not be added since more and more processes needed to be handled manually and outside the system.
• The compensation plan and the system were not formally or explicitly documented, lacking a “single version of the truth”.

The Solution. By working very closely with the business leaders of the Company, a team of Business Analysts from Belatrix was able to fully document the existing compensation plan of the Company, which up to that point was not documented formally, and establish a baseline and “single version of the truth”. Based on this formal documentation, Belatrix assigned a team of expert compensation developers that were able to completely write a commissions engine in a time span of 8 weeks, including import-export procedures to connect the new system with the existing applications of the Client. Taking into account the client preferences and reusing existing technologies, the system was developed on Borland Delphi using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as the RDBMS.

The Results. The new commissions system enables the Client to leverage benefits such as:

• Reduced time to market: they can add new markets without undergoing the pain the old system produced.
• More accurate and up to date reporting: compensation data can be stored in a relational database and ad-hoc reports can be written quickly and easily.
• New bonuses and business rules can be added to the system in less time and with less effort because of the modular and object-oriented architecture.
• The Client’s business executives can now run simulations and what-if analysis of changes in their commission structure without actually having to make those changes in production.

We invite you to learn how a relationship with Belatrix will give your company a distinctive advantage through low cost, disciplined, and high quality software development services.

You may contact us at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Phone number: +1 (617) 608-1413