Boosting sales with streamlined contest management

Macy’s custom incentives and compensation application redefines and streamlines sales contest management.

Challenge

To boost sales and drive higher employee engagement, Macy’s frequently offers sales contests across a variety of merchandise types and vendors. Needing to correlate multiple types of contests with varied compensation combinations, made contest management overly complex and challenging.

The legacy system was Excel-based – requests were emailed and manually managed in an unwieldy spreadsheet. The spreadsheet passed through multiple back-and-forth communications among team members. The entire process was slow, error-prone and turned version control and accuracy into ongoing concerns. Macy’s needed an automated, streamlined system incorporating business rules and approvals to facilitate the process and make contests easier and more efficient to manage.

Services:

User experience planning & user interface design Information architecture development Custom application development Data architecture & systems integration Ongoing maintenance & support

Macy’s custom incentives and compensation application redefines and streamlines sales contest management.

Services:

User experience planning & user interface design Information architecture development Custom application development Data architecture & systems integration Ongoing maintenance & support

Challenge

To boost sales and drive higher employee engagement, Macy’s frequently offers sales contests across a variety of merchandise types and vendors. Needing to correlate multiple types of contests with varied compensation combinations, made contest management overly complex and challenging.

The legacy system was Excel-based – requests were emailed and manually managed in an unwieldy spreadsheet. The spreadsheet passed through multiple back-and-forth communications among team members. The entire process was slow, error-prone and turned version control and accuracy into ongoing concerns. Macy’s needed an automated, streamlined system incorporating business rules and approvals to facilitate the process and make contests easier and more efficient to manage.

Tablet, mobile, desktop and laptop screens of the incentives and compensation system

Strategy

Through a series of collaborative working sessions with Macy’s, Sanger & Eby developed a 360-degree view of contest operations and business rules. Then, we created an interactive prototype to help Macy’s team understand, review and approve functionality prior to writing any code. We developed a data structure to effectively manage all the variations of contests and their associated business rules.

Built-in status tracking ensures all parties are aware of timing, issues and next steps. Data automatically feeds into the compensation system, thus eliminating manual calculations and dramatically boosting productivity. Detailed sorting, filtering and searching functions enable system users to quickly and efficiently manage the queue.

The final application brought 11 different forms, hundreds of logic pathways, integration with existing client systems and automatic PDF generation into one automated, streamlined contest system.

Tech stack

The following languages and platforms were used to bring this project to life:

Languages

HTML5
CSS

Frameworks/tools

ASP.NET
.NET MVC
MS SQL Server
Bootstrap
jQuery
jQuery UI
Axure R/P

Results

Sales contest creation, approval and management have been dramatically streamlined. The cross-functional system was distributed throughout Macy’s entire stores network. It has enabled contest sponsors and the compensation team to collaborate seamlessly to communicate, create contests, request clarification, modify contest parameters and approve or reject requests.

After the successful launch, Macy’s partnered with Sanger & Eby to extend the system to be used by Bloomingdale’s stores as well.

 

Do you need help reimagining how your company manages systems and processes? Let’s talk!