Guide
People Analytics Software Comparison Guide
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How Inari Automated Its Merit Cycle and Put Pay Decisions in Managers' Hands
Inari, the SEEDesign company, designs nature-positive seeds for a more sustainable food system — and wanted the same precision in how it pays its people. By adopting Visier's Smart Compensation as an early partner, Inari replaced spreadsheet juggling with a guided, data-driven process, cut merit-cycle planning to ten minutes, and gave managers real ownership of pay decisions.
10 min
to set up merit-cycle planning for promotions and adjustments
Our Summary:
Industry
Technology / Agriculture
Headquarters
Cambridge, MA
Company size
320 employees (42 users of Smart Compensation)
Visier solutions used
Workforce Insights
The challenge:
Juggling multiple spreadsheet versions and performance evaluations on tight timelines made a true data-informed approach to compensation feel out of reach — and raised privacy and security concerns.
Why Visier Workforce AI:
Inari needed an automated, guided way to handle promotions and allocate pay, and to support a future shift toward pay-for-performance.
Key outcomes:
Inari automated and guided its compensation process, empowered managers with real-time insight, and reduced merit-cycle planning to ten minutes.
With Visier's Smart Compensation, Inari has:
Empowered managers to make better compensation decisions with real-time employee insights and recommendations
Automated and guided the compensation process, reducing errors and streamlining the workflow
Reduced merit-cycle planning to 10 minutes
THE CHALLENGE
No single, data-driven view of compensation
Before Smart Compensation, Inari was juggling multiple versions of spreadsheets and performance evaluations on tight timelines, and a data-informed approach to pay seemed a far-off reality. “Prior to implementing Smart Compensation, HR was simply receiving names that managers wanted to put forward for a promotion or a market adjustment, and then managers were approving HR's recommended pay increase — there was no data-driven approach that enabled managers to make decisions with information all in one location,” explains Suzanne Wagner, Talent and Culture Manager. Cobbling information together from multiple sources was inconvenient and raised privacy and security concerns.
Smart Compensation is the most powerful compensation tool on the market.
— Mark Berry, Chief People Officer, Inari
THE SOLUTION
An automated, guided merit process for managers
Inari needed an automated way to facilitate promotions and ensure the proper allocation of base pay and bonuses — and wanted to support a future shift in pay philosophy from ad hoc to pay-for-performance. When it discovered Visier was releasing a new compensation product, Inari agreed to be an early adopter and development partner.
We were grateful to have the chance to be a part of the early introduction of Smart Compensation. We've been able to influence the development of the product heavily… seeing features being built based on our input. From the beginning, I had full confidence that Visier would get us where we needed to be.
— Mark Berry, Chief People Officer, Inari
THE OUTCOME
Greater manager accountability — and real time saved
With Smart Compensation, Inari no longer deals with versioning, integration issues, or the manual work of compiling spreadsheets. Managers can immediately see how much is being spent and whether it's going to the right areas of the business, with real-time visibility into the decisions made for each employee. “The first thing we noticed with Smart Compensation was the user experience — it was intuitive for managers. It did not require a lot of training,” says HR Operations Manager Vladimir Solano. The tool also fostered greater integrity, accountability, and transparency with Finance, which can now access compensation data directly instead of waiting on HR.
With Smart Compensation, we were able to set up the mid-year cycle planning for promotions and adjustments within 10 minutes, so we've realized a huge time and efficiency savings. Smart Compensation is much safer than using spreadsheets as it applies consistent custom formulas, such as for LTI.
— Vladimir Solano, HR Operations Manager, Inari
Looking ahead, Inari plans to use the BambooHR connector to automate data upload and export around each comp cycle, and to shift toward a pay-for-performance philosophy — made easier by Smart Compensation's built-in pay-philosophy guidance.
Ready to transform your merit process? See how Smart Compensation by Visier makes pay decisions faster, safer, and manager-owned. See what Visier can do for you.
