Summary
Lumanity is a global healthcare advisory firm that helps life sciences companies generate, demonstrate, and communicate the value of their medicines to accelerate and optimize patient access. With 1,200 highly specialized experts conducting work in more than 50 countries, and offices in North America, the UK, the EU, and Asia, Lumanity serves leading pharmaceutical companies and over 100 biotechs worldwide.
Running compensation cycles across a global organization with multiple capabilities and limited shared infrastructure was a grind. For Ben Bartoszek, Global Director of Total Rewards at Lumanity, that meant managing every merit and bonus cycle out of a maze of Excel files—one per business unit, held by individual HR Directors, invisible to anyone else. There was no single source of truth, and there was no easy way to give business leaders the experience they deserved.
Lumanity partnered with Pave to leverage Compensation Planning as their primary tool for merit and bonus cycles, alongside Team View for HRBP and manager visibility into range penetration. The result: their most recent compensation cycle generated more positive feedback than every prior cycle combined.
Key Wins
- Replaced a fragmented, multi-spreadsheet compensation process spanning multiple business units with a single unified platform
- Delivered the highest-rated compensation cycle in Lumanity's history, generating overwhelmingly positive HRBP and planner feedback
- Enabled a bottoms-up budgeting approach that gave planners real-time budget visibility
- Gave HRBPs continuous visibility into where every employee sits in their pay range through Team View—a feature the HR team now actively champions
Spreadsheets & Silos in a Sprawling Org
Ben Bartoszek has spent his career in total rewards. When he joined Lumanity as Global Director of Total Rewards, he found a setup that leaned heavily on Excel—and a set of business needs that made the problem harder, not easier.
Lumanity is a complex company with multiple capabilities and business units, and with staff around the world – including research analysts, public relations, advertising, market access, and pharma consulting teams, each with their own compensation structures, budget owners, and HR Directors.
The downstream effect was predictable: business leaders found the compensation process confusing and burdensome, HRBPs were stuck in the weeds of administration rather than doing strategic work, and cycle retrospectives were uniformly negative. There was nothing to celebrate, and nothing that felt like it was improving.
"Our goal was to make the compensation process significantly easier for our business leaders—and to give the HR team back the time they were losing to spreadsheets."
— Ben Bartoszek, Global Director of Total Rewards at Lumanity
One Platform, Unified Cycles
Lumanity chose to partner with Pave and went live with Compensation Planning in mid-2024, running their first full merit and bonus cycle on the platform shortly after. Since then, Ben has iterated on the process to improve the planner experience for managers. Most recently, he pre-populated merit and bonus recommendations for every employee before opening worksheets to planners, meaning business leaders could review and adjust rather than build from scratch.
Ben also shifted from a top-down to a bottoms-up budget model, which gave planners direct visibility into their own budgets and made tracking dramatically easier. By his assessment, this produced the most accurate budget tracking Lumanity had ever run.
"We got significantly more positive feedback this cycle. It’s rare to get so much great feedback on a compensation process, so I was genuinely surprised by how much appreciation came back this time around."
— Ben Bartoszek, Global Director of Total Rewards at Lumanity
Unlocking Strategy for HR
For the HR business partners, Team View has become one of Pave's most-loved features at Lumanity. The ability to see at a glance where every employee sits within their pay range—and to share that visibility with managers—has shifted how HRBPs think about compensation conversations. Instead of digging through spreadsheets to answer a question, the answer is already in front of them.
The Pave support team also played a meaningful role in Lumanity's success. Ben, who describes himself as hard to impress, made a point of calling out the responsiveness of the support team throughout the cycle—quick to respond, and genuinely helpful when things got complicated.
"The support team was exceptional. Any time we reached out, they responded quickly—even on weekends. For a team running a complex, global compensation cycle, that kind of responsiveness is not a nice-to-have. It is what makes the difference."
— Ben Bartoszek, Global Director of Total Rewards at Lumanity
The shift from spreadsheet-driven cycles to structured, platform-supported ones has also changed how the HR team thinks about their work. With planners doing more of the reviewing and less of the building, Ben and his team have been able to focus on the strategic layer—outlier analysis, equity review, and making sure the compensation story told at the end of every cycle is one the organization can be proud of.
What Comes Next
As Lumanity continues its Pave journey, Ben has plenty of compensation updates on his roadmap. This includes introducing an evergreen cycle model for handling promotions and off-cycle increases year-round, and expanding the platform's ability to handle compensation recommendations in India as the team grows globally.
The longer-term vision is a compensation program that is not just easier to run, but one that earns the trust of every stakeholder—from the HR business partners who use it daily to the senior leaders who sign off on budgets. Lumanity is building that infrastructure now, one cycle at a time.
