The following was a question given to a candidate for a Business Analyst role during their interview process.
Hewlett-Packard predominantly uses an indirect sales operation model. This means it sells-in its product portfolio to distributors, who subsequently sell-out to their resellers who then sell-on to their final customers (B2B/B2C).
Hewlett-Packard’s sales operations across EMEAR operate according to a matrix organisational structure i.e., Central Product Management with responsibilities for the sales and marketing of specific product portfolios called Business Units (e.g., Large Format Printers, Video Projectors, Consumer Printers etc.) and Regions that are responsible for sales in designated territories (e.g., UK & Ireland, France, Spain & Portugal, Italy etc.)
Current Business Operations
Hewlett-Packard already collects data from its distribution channel which identifies the quantity and value of products sold and to which reseller partner they were sold to and has an existing CRM tool to manage detailed partner information such as their address, marketing preferences, business classifications and related contacts.
Hewlett-Packard also has a partner portal where partners can register, log in and see key information about Hewlett-Packard products as well as the partners sales, incentives, and rewards.
To drive additional sales through the channel, Hewlett-Packard will on occasion offer incentives on specific products to selected partners (distributors/resellers) in the channel. E.g., printers that are soon to be superseded by a new model may be heavily discounted to make space for the newer model.
Each Region/Business Unit has a dedicated budget allocation to spend on such activities. This budget must not be exceeded.
Your Task
You are new in the role as a Business Analyst and your manager has given you the task to develop a tool to manage this incentive process. Please produce a PowerPoint presentation showing:
- Which stakeholders will be involved in the design and specification of the tool and why?
- Which key elements of the project lifecycle are important to make this delivery a success?
- A graphical representation of the end-to-end process logic, based on your design please provide an Entity Relationship Diagram of the basic data structure
- What key decisions and assumptions you have made about the logic, controls and communication
- How you will address any questions or challenges that may occur during this process
You should consider the following:
- Spend must not exceed budget
- Spend must be ‘approved’ by management
- The selected channel partners should be fully ‘informed’ of the promotion(s) detailing what the incentive / reward is and then encouraged to take part and make it a success, for this they will be rewarded based on sales ‘targets’ set as part of the incentive.
- The system should be capable of automatically measuring the target achievement and paying out the rewards
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