Not every implementation story starts at the beginning. Sometimes a company arrives at the door of a new partner mid-crisis with a system already in place, a team already frustrated, and commissions that simply aren't calculating correctly. That's exactly where Alliance Consumer Group (ACG) found itself when they came to Canidium.
ACG had compensation software installed, plans built, and components configured. What they didn't have was a system that worked. The implementation they inherited from a previous partner had left the environment in poor shape; rules that didn't fire correctly, naming conventions that no longer matched the plans they were meant to serve, and a team without the knowledge or confidence to fix any of it on their own.
The system was in place. The commissions weren't calculating. And the team didn't know why.
Making the situation more complex was that ACG didn't want a long, drawn-out engagement. They had already been through one slow implementation experience. They weren't looking for another partner to take over and work in isolation; they wanted someone who would work with them, fixing problems in real time, explaining the logic as they went, and leaving ACG genuinely capable of managing the system themselves when it was over.
That meant Canidium had to adapt before the project even started.
The original plan called for a standard discovery phase: time to assess the environment, map the existing logic, and build a remediation roadmap. ACG needed immediate progress on reusing and repairing existing components, which meant pivoting instantly to hands-on working sessions without the typical preparatory runway.
Instead of a traditional engagement, Canidium shifted to real-time collaborative build sessions → fixing rules live, with the client in the room.
Those working sessions became the core of the engagement. Rather than Canidium disappearing to rebuild plans and returning with a finished product, the team worked through the logic together, identifying the specific rules that weren't firing, tracing the misleading naming conventions back to their source, and rebuilding the core plans and components side by side with ACG's internal team. When a rule was fixed, the client understood why it had been broken. When a new component was configured, the client knew how to replicate it.
The inherited technical debt was significant. Rules built by a previous partner carried names tied to legacy compensation structures that no longer existed, creating silent logic errors where a rule appeared to work but was calculating something entirely different than intended. Untangling that required careful investigative work on a system Canidium hadn't originally built, with no paper trail to follow.
The goal was not just to fix the system, but to make sure ACG never needed to call for help with the same problem twice.
Knowledge transfer was built into every session. By the time the remediation was complete, ACG's internal team understood the architecture of their own system, absorbing what the plans were doing, how the components connected, and what to look for if something broke again. Canidium provided basic troubleshooting training to anchor that understanding and leave the team genuinely self-sufficient.
From start to finish, including remediation, testing, and troubleshooting, the entire engagement wrapped in approximately one to one and a half months. What ACG had feared would be a long, disruptive process turned out to be one of the fastest paths from broken to operational Canidium had delivered.
Canidium had done exactly what they set out to do: taught them how to be self-sufficient.
Alliance Consumer Group (ACG) is a consumer goods company that came to Canidium with a compensation system already in place but fundamentally broken. A previous implementation partner had left their Xactly environment with configuration errors, incorrect commission calculations, and naming conventions that created logic conflicts across their compensation plans. ACG needed a partner who could fix the system quickly and collaboratively without needing a lengthy re-implementation engagement.
Most Canidium case studies involve building something new. The ACG engagement was about rescuing something broken. That required a different skill set: forensic analysis of inherited logic, the ability to pivot methodology in real time, and a teaching-first approach to every fix. The goal wasn't to demonstrate Canidium's expertise, but to transfer that expertise directly to the client so that ACG walked away owning their system in a way they never had before.
Canidium specializes in getting compensation systems back on track quickly, and making sure your team has the knowledge to keep them there. Talk with an expert to explore what a remediation engagement could look like for your organization.