Franklin Templeton Case Study

About

Based in San Mateo, Calif., Franklin Templeton is a publicly traded investment company with $1.6 trillion under management. It has grown to be one of the world’s largest asset managers, acquiring well-known brands, including Putnam Investments and Legg Mason.

The Challenge

Melane Nelson, a 17-year Franklin Templeton veteran, is the company’s director of executive and enterprise compensation, managing the team that oversees compensation for 7,000 employees in 40 countries. She managed the process that selected Compose by Decusoft to replace a previous compensation management platform.

Why did you decide to look for a new compensation platform?

We’d been using the same system since I joined the company in 2007. It wasn’t much more than a glorified spreadsheet, and wasn’t very customizable. We couldn’t easily give managers information about the prior years’ compensation of employees. That’s very important to us because we are very much a year-over-year company.

That system also threw away all the data at the end of each cycle. You had to load it all again the next year. And if you needed to make even a small change in the data, you had to start over.

So at the end of 2017, we decided to look at what other options were available in the market.

Why did you choose Compose?

After surveying the entire market, we got down to a final four, including Decusoft. We looked hard at Workday, which we’d been using for other HR functions. Its compensation module might be good for someone moving from a spreadsheet, but it couldn’t do what we needed.

What drew us to Decusoft was its ability to handle all the variations across the company. We have more than 50 plans, and our compensation needs are only getting more complex. Still, what tipped us over the edge was Decusoft’s customer service and the relationships we’d built with the people there.

The Solution

What was the implementation like?

We started implementing Compose in February 2020. A whole team from Decusoft came down and spent two days interviewing us. For the most part, the implementation went off without a hitch. We were able to do what we needed. And we’ve been able to put more information, including the historical data, into our planning grids.

How did Decusoft handle the complexity of your organization?

It’s been super easy to manage all the variations, and we have lots of them. In some divisions, all the compensation decisions are made at more senior leader levels in some areas versus first-level leaders elsewhere. In Decusoft, it’s simple to go in and update the hierarchy and who gets access to the tool. We can also customize the views and the planning grids for different divisions.

Our total rewards statements also vary throughout the organization. With Decusoft, my team can build those using the report writer instead of sending a list of requirements to the vendor. That’s important, because leaders often ask for multiple rounds of revisions, and we can just go in and take care of them.

The Results

What’s been the impact of using Decusoft on your compensation organization?

Our team is a lot more nimble now, managing the back end. We can do whatever we want quickly without having to go back to the vendor. And if a salary or other information changes, we can update it without having to reload all the data.

We also save time because we aren’t handling requests for reports. With the old system, any time a leader had a question, they would reach out to their HR partner, who would ask us for a report. We would have to download information to an Access database and run it for them.

Now, the leader can go into Compose, press a button, and get a complete report with all the compensation information and history for their organization. It’s easy for them to move the data from the report into Excel if they want to do some analysis or modeling.

What’s next for Franklin Templeton and Decusoft?

We’re looking forward to taking advantage of the new Compose AI features. I think it may help the division leaders take better advantage of the power of Decusoft. There’s already a lot of power in the system, but we have to keep reminding them about it. With the capabilities of the built-in AI feature, it should be easier for them to just type their request in and get an instant response.