Building a Fully Customized Sales Commission Management System on Odoo Community to Integrate with a Health Insurance Marketplace

Overview

Novobi utilized the flexibility of Odoo Community to deliver a comprehensively custom Sales Commission Management System that complements NAHP’s healthcare marketplace.

The Client

INDUSTRY:

Health care, Insurance

LOCATION:

Texas, United States

North American Health Care Plans (NAHP)

North American Health Plans is provided exclusively by North American Life Plans, a national independent insurance marketing organization. The company supports a network of more than a thousand agents supporting customer acquisition on an online healthcare marketplace. NAHP is an innovative health insurance service that provides comprehensive coverage at 30% to 50% less than traditional marketplace plans with the freedom to see any doctor, any hospital, anywhere.

Challenge #1

NAHP’s sales commission model is not supported by any existing systems in the market

Solution

Build a custom system on Odoo Community for customization flexibility

Challenge #2

Manual tracking of agent commissions is not scalable

Solution

Automating the commission management process

“They needed a software to handle their complex sales commission model. Nothing in the market was able to meet their requirements, so we had to build a fully custom system using Odoo as a platform.”

 

– Duy Vu | Business Analyst, Novobi

The Client’s Challenge

NAHP’s manual process for managing the sales commissions of thousands of agents across their networks created complexities that highlighted their need to find a better system. With such a complicated commission model, HIPAA compliance requirements, and the need to integrate with their health insurance marketplace, finding a single system that met their needs proved to be difficult.

Sale Commission Management

Sales commission model is not supported by any existing systems in the market.

The sales commission model for NAHP requires a system that can handle complex computations. The logic needed to calculate commission payment and commission projection for agents includes several variables such as product types, agent hierarchy, agent roles, and sold policies. Since the commission model does not follow a standard or simple commission calculation, NAHP wanted a customized solution to match their requirements. In addition, the system must also work with a customer-facing healthcare marketplace and adhere to HIPAA regulations.

Scalability

Manual tracking of agent commissions is not scalable

The client’s legacy process for handling commissions was largely manual and required heavy calculation from sales statements issued by insurance carriers. This process presented three significant issues for the company: possible inaccuracy in calculations, lack of scalability, and manual work time. The business wanted a system that could handle records and payments for their agents in a fraction of the time they spent on manual work.

“There were a lot of requirements for this project, but the logic, calculations took priority. They were complex, and there is no room for error. We documented everything carefully and made sure all calculations are triple-checked and verified by the product owner.”

 

– Duy Vu | Business Analyst, Novobi

Novobi’s Solution 

As part of a larger engagement with NAHP that included a custom built health insurance marketplace with full HIPAA compliance and a robust CRM and payment gateway, Novobi engineered an agent commission management tool to automate manual processes. The commission management tool integrates seamlessly with the rest of the system, tracking records of agent performance throughout the entire sales workflow and providing the necessary data for automatic commission calculations.

Build the System on Odoo Community for Customization Flexibility

Even with the vast selections of apps on Odoo enterprise, NAHP’s system requirements called for a fully custom solution. Novobi recommended Odoo’s Community version, a flexible framework set to accommodate heavy customization and full integration with a healthcare marketplace.

This open-source framework could be expanded with custom feature development needed to run the sales commission management system. Novobi invested a great deal of effort into the system, perfecting the logic to calculate commission payment.

Along with commission calculations, Novobi’s data analyst architected projections to give commission insights for a few years ahead. Novobi meticulously documented the process, and NAHP carefully verified the logic. Also, an extended time was dedicated to system and regression testing before go-live to ensure the new system was running error-free.

Automating the Commission Management Process

Novobi built a commission platform that automatically registers and calculates agent commissions, allowing payment to be dispersed across stakeholders over time without error or manual tracking.

This automated system handles upward of 200,000 annual transactions and significantly reduces commission processing time.

“Novobi’s experience with back-end, as well as customer interfaces enables our team to quickly deploy business solutions. We are impressed with their project, risk, and budget management capabilities. They provide industry-leading project tracking and reporting, appropriate for large scale implementation while minimizing bureaucracy when necessary.”

 

– Paul Andries | IT Director, NAHP

The Novobi Approach

Novobi follows a strict implementation schedule following CMMI and Scrum frameworks with weekly sprints, ensuring that clients can expect demos and workable solutions weekly or biweekly. Novobi also follows best practices in configuration and customization to ensure the system functions correctly and protects client’s intellectual property. This approach makes it easier and more cost-effective to upgrade in the future.

Discovery

Planning

Implementation

Launch

Training

Support

Discovery

Novobi and NAHP spent many hours meeting to understand the intricacies of the business’ compensation plans. The discussions mainly focused on breaking down the details on how the company develops and administer the compensation and bonus plans for their agents, how payments are disbursed, and how to reconcile payment discrepancies.

Planning

A Novobi solution architect with a data science background worked with the client to design the database architecture and solution architecture to support the automated commission system.

Implementation

Because the system’s requirements are complex, Novobi couldn’t fully leverage any pre-built solutions. The developers needed to code all the custom fields, data, and logic from the ground up. Novobi also prepared an extended period for system and regression testing before going live.

Novobi sent NAHP the list of changes (release notes) and a detailed testing guideline weekly requesting feedback and to flag any feature as failed/passed. The development took a year to complete.

Launch

Go-live proceeded with no downtime, however Novobi took adequate time to ensure that the system rolled out without significant issues. Novobi quickly corrected any issues with fringe circumstances including slight projection miscalculation to ensure proper function moving forward.

Training

Novobi’s team worked with two key users at NAHP. Throughout the project, they provided the inputs and participated in system testing. Because of their involvement during development, they understood the solution by the time the system launched. They then provided training for the other users in their company.

Support

Novobi has provided ongoing support through online meetings to troubleshoot issues and releases updates when bugs are found and fixed.

Novobi's Methodology & Certifications

The Results  

The complex logic required to build this system laid the foundation for automating NAHP’s workflow. With hundreds of thousands of transactions to process annually, efficiently managing sales commissions and scalability are nearly impossible without an automated system. Novobi delivered the exact system NAHP required in order to automate their current commission workflows as well as scale in the future.

Grow Their Agent Network

By automating manual commission processes

By automating the sales commission workflow, NAHP is able to manage nearly two thousands agents in their network with ease. The system also allows them to take on new agents and customers with ease.

 

Save Time

And increase calculation accuracy

With the system handling the heavy calculations and record-keeping, NAHP saves a significant amount of time on labor while decreasing human-driven errors inherent with manual work.

Want to Learn More?

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