Intelsat Trims Salary and Bonus Review Cycle from Five Weeks to Three with Charlton Consulting Group’s Customized Compensation Management Platform

The Challenge:

Automate Compensation Reviews for a Global Workforce
As the leading provider of fixed satellite services worldwide, Intelsat has been setting the standard for transmissions of video, data and voice services for more than 45 years. In 2001, the company decided it was time to bring some of the same innovative exchange of information and communication to its annual salary and bonus review and recommendation process.

Intelsat previously conducted its compensation reviews via spreadsheets that were passed between managers, and eventually forwarded to the benefits and compensation department once all the information was completed. The entire review cycle often took five weeks.

With revenues of $3 billion, Intelsat operates in 15 countries, maintaining its corporate headquarters in Luxembourg and administrative offices in Washington, D.C., and employs approximately 1,000 people.

“Our large and very global workforce meant the process involved management of a lot of data,” said Rory Velasquez, Intelsat’s Senior Manager, Compensation & Retirement. “Since our system is hierarchy-based, spreadsheets were simply too static and didn’t offer the functional capabilities we needed to streamline the process. In particular, ‘rolling up’ information became very difficult because manual hand-offs and approvals-across several management levels- made the process slow, cumbersome and error-prone.”

Although Intelsat had recognized the need to automate its compensation management platform for several years, both the hiring of Velasquez and the decision to privatize the company served as catalysts for immediate action.

The Answer:

Customized Compensation Management Technology from Charlton Consulting Group
Intelsat was running its HRIS system on the Oracle platform. Velasquez initially looked at the possibility of deploying a compensation management system through Oracle, but realized it was just too time and labor intensive to create a customized option to meet the company’s needs.

“We wanted something simple and easy to deploy,” Velasquez said. “We had actually considered building something for several years within Oracle. The problem was that the system was inflexible and the time and resources involved to create a customized solution were significant.”

She then approached Maryland-based Charlton Consulting Group because the firm had already been providing benefits services to Intelsat in other areas. Velasquez was thoroughly impressed with the firm’s compensation management platform in the initial demo.

“Charlton Consulting Group’s compensation management platform had the big advantage of flexibility,” she said. “We could add reports and functionality-when we needed it-quickly and seamlessly. The solution was not overly engineered, making it administration-free and user-friendly.”

The completely customized compensation management system seamlessly runs outside of Intelsat’s HRIS and is hosted by Charlton Consulting Group. The 270 managers using the system can easily access the information they need from their desktops. Specific customizations included the ability to automatically:

• Allocate supplemental bonuses (outside of the typical yearly bonus pool). Intelsat had special bonus allocations that where limited to the vice-president level and above, so the user interface had to be changed to only allow specific management levels access to that information.
• Calculate figures in local currencies. In 2010 alone, Intelsat had 100 employees outside the United States and had to calculate compensation in 15 different currencies. Managers could toggle between local currencies and U.S. dollars (the default currency for existing budgets).
• Present salary and ratings history. As managers were inputting information, they needed instant access to historical salary and bonus data as well as performance ratings.
• Generate employee letters. Once all the managers entered their information and compensation was approved, the system was reopened so they could generate Personnel Action Letters (from built-in templates) to share with employees.
• Produce custom reports. Intelsat generated more than 200 different reports at the end of the review cycle. With a few clicks of a mouse, the two-person reporting team could generate any custom report, chart, and graph it needed.

The Result:

Significant Reductions in Time Associated with Manager Input, Executive Meetings and Reporting
According to Velasquez, the reporting team, in particular, has greatly benefited from an automated compensation management system. “It used to take the team four business days to run all those reports. Now, with the Charlton Consulting Group solution, we’ve reduced that time down to only two business days,” she said.

Additionally, Velasquez noted these time and resource savings:

• The entire salary and bonus review cycle was trimmed from five weeks to three.
• It used to take managers a full two weeks to complete their input. Now, it only takes five business days.

“Our customized compensation management system does exactly what we need it to do,” Velasquez said. “Charlton Consulting Group has certainly done its due diligence to provide us with an expedited process-all the way from manager recommendation to employee paycheck.”

Charlton Consulting Group has worked with Intelsat for more than a decade and continues to evolve the system in response to the company’s changing needs. Intelsat is staying with the desktop solution for now, but the eventual goal is to move to a web-based platform.

About Intelsat
Intelsat is the leading provider of fixed satellite services worldwide. For over 45 years, Intelsat has been delivering information and entertainment for many of the world’s leading media and network companies, multinational corporations, Internet Service Providers and governmental agencies. Intelsat’s satellite, teleport and fiber infrastructure is unmatched in the industry, setting the standard for transmissions of video, data and voice services. From the globalization of content and the proliferation of HD, to the expansion of cellular networks and broadband access, with Intelsat, advanced communications anywhere in the world are closer, by far.

For more information on Charlton Consulting Group’s compensation management solutions, contact us at 877-203-5625 or via email at info@charltonconsulting.com