Calculating Data

The processing engine is called the Pipeline. This engine performs tasks to process compensation, import data, create payments and balances, and many more tasks. Running a pipeline is key to compensation and generates Dashboards, Reports, and other results.

The Pipeline should be run consistently 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 payee payments and balances. 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.

In this course, we will focus on the first task: Run a Compensation Calculation for All Sales Deals. For simplicity, we will refer to this task as the Calculation.

The first four stages of the Calculation are generally run together as a sequence called Compensate and Pay. These four stages begin with transactions and process the plan rules to produce trial payments and balances. The four stages of Compensate and Pay are:

• Classify: This stage compares transaction fields to the classifiers we set up in the category hierarchies. The transaction is classified when there is a match between a transaction field and a classifier. The transactions are grouped based on transaction entries that match the classifiers.
• Allocate: Classified transactions are processed by credit rules using direct transaction assignments, territory requirements, conditions, and roll relationships to allocate credits to Positions. Primary Measurements then aggregate Credits.
• Reward: Secondary Measurements are calculated from previously calculated measurements or other compensation plan elements. Incentive values are determined, and deposit amounts are created and marked with deposit release information.

• Pay: Balances from prior periods are applied to the current balance, and payments are generated.

  At this point, this is only a Trial payment. This is because Compensate and Pay is usually run multiple times during the period, so we are not ready to mark the amount as permanent.

  

Post and Finalize are additional calculation stages that mark calculations from the Pay stage as permanent and close the period.

During the Post stage, payments and balances from the Pay stage are permanently stored. Each posted payment represents a payout to a participant. This stage is generally run only once at the end of the period, although it can be run multiple times if needed.

Finalizing a period stops any new compensation from being paid in the current period. Further transactions, credits, or deposits can be processed in a finalized period, but any values that are calculated will be marked as a balance for payment in the next open period.

Both Post and Finalize have an Undo option. However, it’s important to be careful with this feature, as it only affects the most recent Pipeline run.

The calculation is typically run at least once per calendar period. This generates results data that can be viewed for each phase based on compensation processing for each period. Using the associated results workspaces, you can track compensation results from transactions to payments for specific periods.

Once a calculation is run, the Pipeline Details pane displays a summary of results and information regarding Stage Statistics, Errors, and Logs.