|
Ah, the power of MS Excel...
A lot of things have gone wrong for CA in 2006, but if there is one example that embodies the company's travails, it is the debacle over sales commissions. Because Swainson had reorganized the sales staff to improve customer relations, it was necessary to adjust the commissions. So the CEO assigned his top sales executive to redesign the plan.
Two problems quickly emerged, says former CA executive Williams, who was brought in to try to keep the plan from spinning out of control. First, he says, "the actual commissions plan - the documen - was very, very confusing, almost impossible to interpret." Worse, perhaps, was the second impediment: implementing it on CA's sclerotic internal computer systems.
CA, Williams says, had a brigade of 15 spreadsheet jockeys in the finance department who were assigned the unenviable task of individually calculating each commission for the company's 4,000 salespeople.
As Williams puts it, "A lot of the internal systems were internally developed and had not been updated, had not been integrated together. So it was a very much a spaghetti code of an application. And no one could believe any of the data." The 15 finance staffers had to "verify the data that no one believed and then ultimately to certify it and put it back into the system."
|