ConsultingThe Situation
A global workforce-solutions enterprise — thousands of consultants placing candidates across dozens of countries under a family of specialist brands — was running its monthly incentive process almost entirely by hand. Commission data lived across a placement and CRM system and a separate analytics platform that wasn't static — historical figures could shift after the fact, making month-to-month reconciliation genuinely difficult to replicate. Individual consultant statements were built in personal spreadsheet files, one by one, then chased through email for manager approval.
The timing was unforgiving before anything went wrong: data typically became available only days before a hard payroll deadline, and a single public holiday inside that window could remove a whole day of buffer. Real compliance exposure sat quietly underneath the timing pressure — commission splits recorded in the CRM depended on individual consultants and managers keeping them current, with no audit trail and no structured accountability for getting it right by the cut-off.
The Approach
We ran our standard process and capability review directly against the commission workflow — mapping it end-to-end from raw data through to payroll output, and timing every stage of a real month-end cycle to see where the hours actually went, not where the org chart assumed they went.
Against that map, we surfaced exactly where value was genuinely being added and where effort was going somewhere it shouldn't: new starters not registered in time for their first statement, leavers and policy changes notified only after statements had already gone out, and a structural rework loop where queries at the approval stage sent work all the way back to the interpretation stage rather than being resolved at the point they were found.
We identified the specific, and often competing, KPI requirements of seven distinct stakeholder groups drawing on the same commission data — consultants, managers, country CFOs, finance business partners, the commission specialist, general managers and executives, and the people function — and confirmed what each genuinely needed, wanted and could realistically get from one redesigned process.
The Delivery
The transformation moved the process from person-dependent spreadsheet work to a governed, largely automated workflow — deliberately built on a standardised calculation model already validated in an earlier phase of work, rather than starting again from a blank sheet, and using workflow-automation and reporting tools already licensed enterprise-wide so no new procurement stood between the design and going live.
The redesign's core move was shifting accountability for data quality upstream: managers and the people function now notify starters, leavers, policy changes and split changes before statement distribution, not after — turning a recurring source of rework into a control point with an owner. A structured approval workflow, with an audit trail, replaced manual email chasing; and a management dashboard gave leaders visibility — gross-profit trend, payout ratios, performance insights — that had essentially not existed before, without exposing sensitive individual data beyond who needed to see it.
The Outcome
Annual cost identified from time reclaimed on a single admin role in a single country, extrapolated across the enterprise's full footprint.
Stakeholder groups with distinct KPI needs, aligned to one redesigned process and dataset.
Starters, leavers and policy changes now notified ahead of statement distribution, not chased afterward.
Governed approval workflow, with an audit trail, replacing manual email chasing across managers.
That figure is built from one thing alone: the processing time reclaimed for one administrator in one country, each month, multiplied out across the enterprise's countries and cycles. It excludes the cost of rework loops, the query-chasing across managers, and the time every stakeholder spent simply making sense of a process nobody could fully see end to end — so the real annual value is materially higher.
A process that previously depended on a handful of people getting a fragile spreadsheet right against a shrinking deadline every month became a governed workflow with clear ownership at every stage — reducing execution risk for the business precisely where the cost of an error is a wrong payment to real people.
From the enterprise's own published transformation philosophy