Culpepper/AHRS Meeting Wrap-up

I attended a great meeting in Bellevue hosted by Leigh Culpepper of Culpepper and Associates (in the middle) and Doug Sayed of Applied HR Strategies (on the left). Yes, that's me on the right.

The topics included an update on compensation trends in the Pacific Northwest in the high technology and biotechnology sectors. Doug has the depth of experience and the data to present a longer term perspective on pay changes and trends in these sectors. It's interesting to note that we seem to be entering a period similar to that of 1999 and 2000 with pay on the rise for key IT and Finance jobs. Hopefully not another "bubble" period though.

Leigh introduced the plans that Culpepper and Associates have for the AHRS survey suite. Culpepper and Associates have a great survey database and great techology for delivering the best in compensation data for over 500 job families (representing several thousand unique jobs) all over the globe.

Congratulations to Elliott. He won the door prize of a new iPod nano! I purposefully did not put my card in the drawing, but I figured Elliott was fair game. He was so excited and said "I can't wait to get home and go running with it!".

After the meeting, Doug, Leigh and I had a nice lunch at McCormick & Schmick's in Bellevue. I highly recommend it if you're in town. Great seafood. Leigh agreed to put a link on his company's website to the CompModel.net site. We are also discussing some other ideas related to NextComp.net and the Culpepper and Associates surveys. Hopefully we can make those ideas reality in 2007.

CompModel Speed Comparison

We were curious just how much faster it is to create a compensation model in CompModel versus a traditional spreadsheet. Here's our test.

Traditional spreadsheet

1. Gather source data into one worksheet
   (10 minutes)


2. Increase current pay ranges by 2.9% using formulas in new columns
   (5 minutes)


3. Create formulas in new columns to check for employees that fall below the minimum of the new pay ranges
   (5 minutes)


4. Create formulas in new columns to increase all employees pay by 4.0% without having pay increase beyond the range maximum
   (5 minutes)


5. Create a 5 segment pay range distribution for current and model pay ranges using formulas
   (10 minutes)


6. Move all employees to next higher segment to increase overall equity
   (5 minutes)

Total Time: 40 minutes

CompModel.net

1. Gather source data into one worksheet
   (10 minutes)


2. Import data into CompModel.net
   (less than 1 minute)


3. Increase ranges by 2.9% using the "Pay Range" operation
   (less than 1 minute)


4. Increase all employees pay by 4.0% without having pay increase beyond the range maximum using "Base Pay" operation
   (less than 1 minute)


5. Create a 5 segment pay range distribution for current and model pay ranges using "Model Settings"
   (less than 1 minute)


6. Move all employees to next higher segment to increase overall equity using "Base Pay" operation
   (less than 1 minute)

Total Time: Less than 15 minutes

CompModel.net is 56% faster than using traditional spreadsheet formulas.

This is just a simple example. More complex models can be created in CompModel, and the time savings would be even greater.

CompModel Trial Accounts Released

We've unleashed CompModel on the world! .

Trial accounts are now available for sign-up.

Sign-up Now for a free no obligation trial account.

We've completed our initial round of testing and we are ready to open up CompModel for a wider audience. You can sign-up now for a trial account. The trial account lets you create one model. You can add another person to the account to get a sense of how CompModel works with multiple users.

Here's a 10 minute demo of CompModel in action.

This is a 23MB Quicktime movie, so you may have to download the file before playing it.

Very soon we'll be releasing the Full Version which let's you create unlimited numbers of models with an unlimited number of users.

And we are working on a Max Version with some really cool range building tools.

We hope to see you next week at the Culpepper/AHRS survey meeting in Bellevue, Wa.