The processing engine used by Incentive Management is called the Pipeline. This engine performs tasks that process compensation, import data, create payments and balances, and many more tasks. Running a pipeline is not only key to compensation, but also generates Dashboards, Reports and other results.
The Pipeline should be run on a consistent schedule and in sequence with other tasks. For example, an organization may wish to do the following:
- Import data from source systems daily at 11 PM local time.
- Run Compensate and Pay daily at 11:30 PM local time.
- Update data in Dashboards weekly.
- Post payments and balances monthly, ten days after the end of the period.
The Pipeline engine is used to perform the following tasks:
- Run a Compensation Calculation for All Sales Deals calculates payments and balances for payees. This is often called the Calculation and is the most common type of Pipeline.
- Import Data from Stage validates and transfers data from staging tables to production.
- Import Plan Data imports plan and plan-related data from an XML file. This is often done to move new plan designs from one environment to another.
- Purge Import Data clears a batch of data records from the staging tables.
- Approve Calculated Data creates a new dataset that can be leveraged in dashboards.
- Purge Approved Data deletes data from the Approve Calculated batch.