- Overview
- By Industry
- Banking
- Business and Professional Markets
- Capital Markets
- Commercial Real Estate
- Federal/Public Sector
- Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals
- Independent Software Vendors
- Insurance
- Lending
- Manufacturing
- Media/Entertainment
- Transportation/Distribution/Logistics
- Utilities/Telco
- By Area of Expertise
- Business Intelligence
- Custom .NET Application Development
- Enterprise Application Integration
- Workflow and Collaboration
Case Studies
Compensation and Planning Solution Supports Business Processes and Planned Growth
Project at a Glance |
|---|
RDA developed a secure, centralized workforce planning and compensation application that reduces manual data entry and improves collaboration while aiding in the standardization of compensation criteria through greater exposure to detailed data. |
About Our Client
RDA's client is a diversified financial services company that provides a broad range of banking, asset management, wealth management, and corporate and investment banking products and services. They are one of the largest providers of financial services in the United States and provide global services through more than 40 offices around the world.
Background
The Fixed Income division of our client's Corporate and Investment Bank (CIB) needed to develop a workforce compensation and position planning solution to support management's analysis and conclusions for staff compensation and hiring decisions.
The Fixed Income division has about 80% of the headcount of CIB in it - around 1,500 people. With planned headcount growth exceeding 10% year over year and subjective incentives representing the bulk of compensation costs, it was critical that Fixed Income management be empowered to proactively manage their hiring plans and compensation pools and to analyze the associated business impact of staffing and compensation decisions. Likewise, it was critical for the Human Resources department to have visibility into the plan to better support the hiring process.
The need for a new solution was driven by both the planned headcount growth within Fixed Income and the inability of the existing tools to support the business process and planned growth. Previously, there was no centralized system. The process for staffing and compensation activities was cumbersome and manually intensive, relying heavily on spreadsheets and requiring a significant amount of duplicate data entry. It was also not secure, and was inconsistently performed from group to group. The new solution needed to address the shortcomings of the existing tools by providing improved data security, reduced error risk, reduced manual effort, reduced variability in subjective compensation criteria, improved collaboration, and overall better tools for analysis and decision making.
Solution Detail
RDA developed People|NET, a C#.NET Winform application utilizing a SQL Server database to fully support CIB's workforce planning and incentive compensation activities. The solution is used primarily by Senior Management, Chief Operating Officers, and the Human Resources department to manage the hiring plan, compensation pool, and the annual incentive process. The solution provides easily accessible interfaces to data used to plan staffing and incentive/compensation needs as well as "pre-canned analytics" and the ability to create custom analytics to assist management in decision making.
People|NET supports the following staffing and compensation analysis activities:- Creating and maintaining a hiring plan.
- Activating planned, unplanned and replacement positions.
- Projecting planned compensation impact of hiring plan.
- Analyzing existing and forecasted headcount by various dimensions.
- Managing the hiring process from a business perspective.
- Managing and tracking pending hires.
- Retiring and replacing positions, including exit payments.
- Creating and maintaining multiple shadow organizations.
RDA's engagement has included numerous additional phases and releases, based on the success of the application and its reception among senior management in the Corporate Investment Bank.
PeopleNet's first release, as well as subsequent releases that added functionality, were 100% on time and on budget. On-time implementation was crucial in order to support the Fixed Income Division's compensation planning business cycle.
Benefits
RDA's solution significantly reduced the amount of work required to develop reliable models and forecasting of costs and human resource needs. In some cases, information that has never before been practical to attempt to analyze is now available at the click of a button. The client has achieved a positive ROI through reduced administration and turnaround of reliable forecasting. In addition, senior management has new insight into the factors and realities that affect their daily business, allowing them to make more informed decisions in a timely manner.
The application implements a secure authentication mechanism and is designed to strictly enforce a dynamic and robust data entitlement model at both the database and object level. This allows users to have multiple views and reports on the data to which they are authorized without concerns about unauthorized or accidental disclosure of sensitive information.
Additional Considerations
Compensation planning, including the calculation and distribution of incentive payments, is a complex, iterative process involving modeling within a series of business and financial constraints. The results of the compensation planning process must meet budget constraints, while providing appropriate rewards for skilled and valued employees who have met and exceeded their individual objectives and contributed to the achievement of their business unit's goals. The rewards also need to reflect market compensation levels for such employees.
This application provides senior management with the ability to interactively model and determine appropriate compensation levels, including base pay and bonuses. The process, which must be completed in a short timeframe, is highly confidential and therefore must be performed in a very secure environment. Accuracy of source information used as a basis for compensation planning, including business unit organizational structures and business results that are used as a basis for the calculation of bonuses, is essential. The business seniority of users and the limited time window they have to devote to this process means that usability is a key factor in the application's design.
Technically Speaking
The RDA team accommodated strict security requirements established for this project. Login credentials from the principal of the logged-in Windows user are managed from Windows Active Directory and passed to the application in order to complete a successful login. User Roles and Entitlements are administered through application interfaces that are persisted to the SQL Server database. The Microsoft Security Application Block is used for encryption of sensitive application settings and metadata.
The solution incorporated Visual Studio 2005, which enabled the project team to rapidly develop a Model-View-Controller based Winform application. Time to market was crucial to successful product delivery. Missing dates even by a small margin was not an option. The ease of use and extensibility of the VS 2005 toolset enabled RDA to meet and in many cases exceed our delivery goals on this complex, pattern-driven architecture.
