Synygy Unveils IC Expert 8, the Most Scalable and Flexible Incentive Compensation Management Software Available Today

Business Wire, Sept 19, 2000

Business Editors/Hi-Tech Writers

BALA CYNWYD, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 19, 2000

Over 40 companies already rely on Synygy IC Expert software. New

features and services guarantee implementation of even the most

complicated plans.

Synygy Inc., The Incentive Compensation Company(TM), today announced IC Expert(TM) 8, the next generation of the most widely used incentive compensation management software on the market today.

Able to support plans encompassing thousands of plan participants involved in multiple variable pay programs, IC Expert 8 is the most scalable and flexible incentive compensation management software available on the market today. Over 40 companies now rely on IC Expert 8 to process a total of over one billion sales transactions each month.

"IC Expert 8 has been honed by nearly a decade of intensive, real-world use and continuous development," said Mark A. Stiffler, president and CEO of Synygy. "No other software can match IC Expert 8 on its history of proven success, speed of implementation, ease of maintenance, functionality, scalability, or performance. And only the Synygy solution combines proven software with the knowledge of nearly 200 Synygy incentive compensation experts."

With the release of IC Expert 8, Synygy becomes the only company that provides clients with a complete range of incentive compensation solutions--from enterprise software (ES) solutions installed in-house at a client site, to application service provider (ASP) solutions installed at Synygy's data center and used via the Internet, to business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions where Synygy performs all plan management activities.

Software for a Complex and Ever-changing World

Forty percent of all companies now provide some form of incentive pay to ALL of their employees. With more non-sales employees covered by variable compensation, and with e-commerce creating new sales channels, incentive compensation plans are becoming much too complex to manage with the home-grown spreadsheets or hard-coded legacy systems that are still used by many companies.

IC Expert 8 is designed to match this new, complex, and ever-changing world.

It has facilities for handling multiple data sources, for cross-checking data to catch and fix errors during the data load process, for managing multiple plans simultaneously, for handling multiple reporting periods, and for constructing web-based, interactive incentive compensation portals for plan participants, executives, and analysts.

The unique plan participant and management analyses produced by IC Expert have been shown over and over again to dramatically improve participants' understanding of their variable pay plan and how their performance affects their payment.

The IC Plan Participant Portal, a Web-based tool for two-way communication of plan objectives and results, enables plan participants to review their achievements and play "what-if" scenarios to see how they can improve future incentive compensation payments.

Tighter Integration: Fewer Errors

All the processes managed by IC Expert 8--from data integration, validation, and cleansing to calculation of results to reporting and analysis to plan modeling--are tightly integrated, enabling the software to manage the entire incentive compensation management process--all within a single system and without the cost and risk of using third-party data manipulation and reporting tools.

One benefit of this tight integration is IC Expert's ability to manage interdependencies and avoid errors. In many companies, the incentive payment for district sales managers depends on the payment for sales reps in that district. If the payment for a sales rep changes, then the payment for the district manager also needs to be recalculated.

Because the data validation, calculation, and reporting modules of IC Expert are tightly integrated, violations of such dependencies are flagged automatically. In competing solutions, users have to manage such problems manually, introducing a major source of potential errors and delays into the process.

New IC Optimizer Service Guarantees Success

To assist clients in successfully implementing the IC Expert 8 incentive compensation management software, Synygy also today announced the IC Optimizer service (see separate release). The unique IC Optimizer service includes six months of plan co-management, where Synygy works with and trains the client's staff to manage the incentive compensation plan in real world conditions.

During that period, Synygy works with the client to uncover data validation, reporting, and other requirements that could only be discovered until the system is put into production.

"With increasingly complex and constantly changing incentive compensation plans, software alone will not guarantee success," continued Stiffler. "IC Expert 8 software and the IC Optimizer implementation service together ensure that companies get the full strategic value of their variable pay programs."

Pricing and Availability

Synygy's IC Expert 8 software is available today, as is the IC Optimizer service. Pricing for the IC Expert 8 software and IC Optimizer service varies according to the number of plan participants and the complexity of the incentive compensation plan. There is no up-front cost for the IC Expert 8 software. The implementation fee to configure the software begins at $100,000.