O.C. Tanner is the world's leading provider of employee recognition solutions including service awards, performance awards and other incentives. O.C. Tanner offers strategic solutions for employee motivation, the latest in recognition ideas and high-tech, online recognition tools.

The President of the Canadian division of O.C. Tanner, John McVeigh, contacted KMP Designs in early 2002 about working with them on the design and development of a Web-based service awards management system targeted at the small and medium sized businesses that dominate the Canadian marketplace.

Small and medium businesses have different requirements from large businesses when it comes to employee recognition. Canada was the ideal place to pilot new innovations and technologies that would scale to support programs of a smaller size. Kent Murdoch, President of OC Tanner Worldwide agreed.

The aim is to offer solutions that are completely Web and email based. An online gift catalog would replace the traditional paper catalog, and gift selection would happen online and be transmitted to customer service by email instead of by telephone. In addition, the solution would have to support setup of a program in up to three languages.

The main challenges were to shorten the time required to build and launch the program to days instead of weeks, to use the Web to engage the customer during the program creation, to ensure that the appearance of the final service awards website was consistent with that of the customer’s so as to appear seamless, to streamline the execution and administration of the program using the Web and to integrate seamlessly with OC Tanner’s order fulfillment system.

In six months, KMP was able to build a Web-based solution that permitted a service awards program to be set up in as little as a day. All that was required was the input of key variables such as company logo, president’s message, corporate colours, font styles, corporate emblem styles, program levels and products. Once the program was launched, the customer’s employees can browse the online catalog in their language of choice and select their award in two easy steps, seamlessly entering their order into OC Tanner’s fulfillment system.

The KMP solution proved a great success and today serves Canadian clients such as Petro Canada and Great West London Life. OC Tanner Worldwide adopted the KMP approach into their practices and today offers similar solution to clients throughout the world. KMP Designs continues to work with OC Tanner Canada on groundbreaking solutions in the field of employee recognition and effectively acts as an R&D arm for the company.

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• KMP Business Object Framework