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SERVICES

Overall

The ACS Menu of Services can be accessed either in and a la carte or in an end-to-end manner. Our goal is to give you what you want in the way that you want it. This is not to say that we will step outside too far outside the sweet spot of where we believe value lives. We pride ourselves on walking away from business the servicing of which could only lead to dissatisfaction and a loss of reputation.


Program Evaluation
This service is assesses the preparedness of an organization to embark on a compensation automation project. It assesses purpose, stake holder commitments, compensation and program governance structures, deliverability of requirements, cost/benefit of compensation plan elements, proposed staff allocations, data quality, developmental and operational capacity, and budget relative to goals to provide a balanced scorecard of readiness. This is a limited duration service with a known scope outcome.

Vendor Selection
This service facilitates the selection of an appropriate compensation automation vendor. ACS has no re-selling relationships with any vendor in the domain nor is our objectivity compromised by the prospect of additional project work as our vendor selection staff never participates in delivery. This service runs from (elements as needed) RFP assistance, Learn More...

Program Management
This service captures the essence of the ACS value add. There are so many ways to squander opportunity and lose value. We have seen over the years astonishing outcomes both for good and bad. We know what to insist on, what to avoid, and that it’s about people and what they believe. With the right people and the right attitude even a challenging project is deliverable on time and budget. A lot too is about experience, when to be heads down and when to be communicating, when to be team-building and when to be demanding, when to work all night and when to stop and have a laugh.
We believe in transparency. We believe in putting the project goals on the wall on Day One of the project. We believe in having everyone work toward the same goal. Reduce ambiguity, reduce politics, reduce waste. Learn More...

Solution Architecture and Module Design
This is another service that taps into the value at the core of ACS. Experience. When you’ve designed, built, and deployed a lot of these systems there are lot of mistakes that you know well how to avoid, a lot of benefits that you are well-schooled in how to deliver, and a lot of context that you don’t need further education to appreciate. We are appreciative and delighted of the opportunity to design total solution flows with the associated data elements, layers of persistence, quality and approval controls, integration into existing Business Event Management schemes, reporting, and analytic/BI dimensions. Your success is our success, and vice versa. We take the opportunity with the utmost seriousness.

Development and Unit Testing Services
By itself this service is a piecemeal thing. It can be used, and we encourage you to test us, for the smallest of purposes: test this code, fix this module, build this subsystem. In concordance with the design services previously mentioned though the value can be greatly amplified due to the minimization of communication costs between design and development and the excision of the possibility of miscommunication. We have strong and particular beliefs on the nature of adequate unit testing, it’s repeatability, it’s documentation. These beliefs form a standard that is consistent across all of our developed objects. The range of compensation sub-domains in which we develop are integration, compensation rules and reporting/analytics.

Testing Design and Execution Services
Here’s a place where, it’s sad to say, we’ve seen more money wasted across the years than we have seen usefully spent, at least in the area of compensation automation projects. The two hardest parts of testing are the identification and/or creation of a sufficient set of test data and the correlated creation of expected results. These are intrinsically expensive activities and want to managed very aggressively to ensure that the results are desirable and obtained at an appropriate cost. Another dimension of the challenge is that as much as possible expected results want to be compared with actual results in an automated fashion. ACS will not run a testing program without validating the appropriateness of the test data and expected results, requiring that the expected results are expressed in a manner suitable for scripted comparison, and ensuring that scripted comparison is used in the vast majority of cases. Learn More...

Logistics and Operations
To get a big program off the ground and keep it moving, there are a great variety of small, somewhat acrobatic maneuvers required, culled out of a broad spectrum of skillsets. Whether it’s setting up new environments, migrating code, comparing differences, creating and managing issue logs, communication with sub-vendors, performance tuning, the list goes on, there will be folks needed who are not necessarily compensation domain folks but who are essential to the delivery of a good result. ACS believes that such persons should not be billed to the client at compensation domain expertise rates but rather as simple commodities. Many is the time we’ve seen not fish or fowl folk fail to add the value that they could not because of a lack of expertise with the things they excel at but rather because they were billed as something they were not. We segregate L+O for this reason, so as to measure and price it properly and enable this critical component of success.