At Trex, a decking and railing manufacturer, business users found themselves caught in their own version of “Excel Hell.” Sales reps and managers were tracking compensation via spreadsheets, leading to endless conflicts and disputes. “Excel spreadsheets are typical for a lot of companies our size,” says Mitch Cox, vice president of sales. “You end up doing the calculations manually and, unfortunately, the accuracy is always called into question.”

The activity also burned away time. “You’ve got a bunch of people spending an inordinate amount of time tracking something that, frankly, they shouldn’t have to waste their time tracking,” Cox says.

Looking for a faster, better way to gauge compensation, Cox turned to SaaS provider Centive and its Compel software. But why did a sales VP spearhead a new software initiative? Cox says he was drawn to the software, and the SaaS model, because Trex simply wasn’t in a position to run on-premises compensation software. “Our IT department is a dedicated group of people that’s very small,” he says. “I needed to have this capability provided from the outside to avoid adding to their burden.”

Cox doesn’t feel that he was forced to settle for a second-rate technology. Compel’s dashboard view gives sales representatives a real-time view of their position and ultimate objective during any given quarter. “Managers love it because they’re able to focus their time where it’s needed most,” he says. “They can understand right away who’s winning and who’s losing on a sales rep basis—and there’s no disputing the data.”

On the downside, although the project was envisioned with the need for minimal IT involvement, things didn’t quite turn out that way, though not for reasons having to do with the Compel product.

The deployment took longer than anticipated, because it took Trex’s IT staff longer than planned to create the necessary export file, using data from Trex’s aging J.D. Edwards ERP data engine. During this process, Trex IT also discovered that the data in the J.D. Edwards application did not always reconcile with the data that its finance department used to calculate commissions. The deployment spanned most of 2006’s second quarter; tweaking, training and other follow-up tasks dragged well into the next period.

“Compel integrated easily with our source systems once we reconciled our data and created the necessary data feeds,” Cox says.

Cox says he’s pleased with both Compel and the SaaS model. “There’s been a decent productivity gain, because people aren’t doing that one-off tracking like they were in the past,” he says.