Andrew Beck of Software Concepts, Inc. writes ...

I think your product is superb! 

Our application is a Sales Commission System for the world's largest ERP software manufacturer. The program is used to compute the sales commissions for approximately 600 sales personnel in their US divisions. The application was written in Visual Basic, and IntellePret is used to compute the commissions payable to each employee based on about 40 different possible factors.

As the commission structure changes periodically throughout the year (driven by economic factors) the system has to be flexible enough to allow the users to change the formulas for computing the commissions without code changes to the program. When we first got the project we thought we could do the calculations using a fixed set of formulas and allowing the user to enter values for predefined variables. However, once we started designing the system we found that the commission calculations were much more fluid than we assumed. Many of the calculations involve if-then cases that proved difficult to model with a fixed dialog. We considered using the Microsoft’s Scripting Host and allowing the user to generate their own scripts, but that proved problematic and too slow for the application.

To help the user develop his code we provide a simply text editor that ties into our database. Variables from the database are displayed in a list from which the user can drag-and-drop them into the text editor. Each commission plan consists of up to 8 different scripts. When they have finished developing their code, the user can fire up a "Test" window that prompts them to enter test value - emulating the data that will be retrieved from the database. Our code then builds a string from the code, and the variables, and passes that to IntellePret for evaluation.

During operation, the program retrieves data from the database for each employee and contract combination and combines that with the code for that employee’s commission plan. This string is then passed to IntellePret for evaluation and the returned value is stored in the database.

With the previous system the client need 2-3 month to facilitate a change in their commission plans, as the program needed to be modified and tested for each new plan. With this design, using IntellePret as the core of the "Calculation Engine", the client can have a new plan up and running in a manner of minutes.