After the start of a busy summer season, Meed Partners set up a program for college interns to participate in our current development projects. Currently Meed is providing multiple clients with design/develop/deploy services on SPM/ICM projects as well as investing significantly in the development of the flagship Compobulator product. A mid 2019 release is targeted, with alpha/trial inquires welcome come January of 2019.

Paul Devlin, the principal partner of Meed, weighed in on the intern program. “I felt it was an opportune path to engaging additional talent in the company’s work efforts while giving some meaningful, real world work experience for college age students of the information sciences. Today’s students are fortunate that these types of opportunities are more available than ever, and we were very pleased at the talent and demonstrated experience that our first intern group brings to the table.”

The first group of 3 interns began their orientation with Meed Partners in late July 2018, with background tours of the current internal software development at Meed. They are currently working on the myriad development tasks slated for the fall of 2018. Xiangzhen Sun, Darshit Chanpura, and Sam Gespass are all currently engaged in post graduate computer science studies. We welcome them joyfully to our Meed Partners milieu and look forward to the many learnings and achievements we will share.

It might just be an outdated assumption among many enterprises that when it comes to deploying an enterprise software solution that you only have two alternatives; either a “conventional” on-premises solution or a cloud-based ERP solution. There is, however, a third type of ERP deployment these days, and that is the hybrid ERP solution.
Most people have a fair amount of experience with the on-premise systems as they dominated the past 25-30 years of IT history. And most people have at least some exposure to the currently more fashionable cloud based systems, and are aware of the benefits, advantages and drawbacks of each approach.

Is the pure cloud solution currently being pushed by most vendors inherently superior to the older on-premise concept? In certain applications and verticals, that may be an easy answer, but the answer is surely not a “yes” across the board. One could make the argument that cloud based technical offerings based on subscription pricing are preferred by ERP vendors for reasons that have less to do with customer interests and satisfaction and more to do with making their lives easier and more profitable.

Automating Variable Compensation: Getting the most out of your Position Design

In variable compensation it is very common to see reference to an entity called ‘position’.  A position is a capacity/role in which a payee functions and for which they receive compensation.  A position often has a name, (like ‘Director of Advanced Widget Sales Northeast’) and a title (like ‘Director’).  Positions often too have a life of their own, that, for example, the Director of Advanced Widget Sales Northeast exists independently of whether Sue or Tom is holding the role.  It may even be empty for a time, but like a physical chair, it does not disintegrate when the sitter stands up.  Object constancy, and all that. 

These position objects are often related to one another, for example that the position ‘Director of Advanced Widget Sales Northeast’ reports to the Vice President of Sales Northeast, or perhaps to the VP of US Widget Sales. This relationship usually looks like a hierarchy, but there are cases where it is more a filtered matrix of some sort, or really it can be as rich and nuanced as the imagination.  It is important to model both positions and their relations accurately to get correct compensation and good analytics.  

When we speak of hard problems in automating variable compensation we are not speaking of cold fusion. Hard problems in variable compensation usually consist of delivering solutions for cases that

1. are outrageously demanding of computational resources
2. have complexity that would shame the famous Rube Goldberg
3. are radically riddled with exceptions
4. All of the above

What follows is a little list, we'll keep it live, of things that have proved difficult.  Sometimes there is a best practice (like "Don't do that!") that will save one from the pitfall.  Othertimes seemingly not.  

One of many topics in the realm of automating variable compensation that deserves extended examination is how to harvest the benefit of flexibility.  While this is a very important thing to get right, it so often falls to the bottom of priority lists and at the end of the day leaves C-level management feeling under-served.  There are a few ways to think about flexibility.  First, is your compensation plan definition and communication prepared organizationally and legally to support multiple changes in a year?  This may or may not be a goal, but some think of flexibility as being able to make changes now, not waiting till the next plan year.  Another way to think about it is the ability to design and deploy very different structures and methods (rapidly) - and ideally without losing important analytical history.  Again, such may not be your particular goal, but, like yoga, flexbility brings other benefits.  When you are very flexible small changes are not big deals because the preparedness for change is embedded end to end in your implementation.

Automating Variable Compensation - an Overview in Q and A form

What is it?

  For the last twenty years, when asked what I do, I've cheerfully replied "I automate Variable Compensation".  Wrinkled brows, blank stares, and courteous inquiry usually follow.  I end up saying "You know, big companies have salespersons who get paid more or less depending on what they sell - commissions, bonuses, draw, etc.".  Eventually the general idea is communicated. Usually saying something about how big the market is helps, pointing out that the volume of this variable compensation often exceeds a billion dollars for given industry leaders.  The majority of folks have never much thought about what the cost of sales adds up to be.

  This practice, of automating variable compensation, has traced its way through the markets as EIM (Enterpise Incentive Management), ICM (Incentive Compensation Management), SPM (Sales Performance Management) and will undoubtedly sprout new acronyms as the old ones lose fashion.  Dynamically continuous variable incentivization?  We have not seen the most amusing chapters, that much is sure.  I'd like to call it VCA, because that's just so cut and dry.