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Applying innovation to mission critical system conversions
The Business Issue IQ’s client is responsible for administering the employee benefits / superannuation schemes for a number of large accumulation and defined benefit schemes. A not-for-profit organisation, it aims to effectively administer superannuation schemes, provide quality services to members and encourage personal investment in that superannuation. The critical challenge facing our client is managing various schemes with multiple combinations of defined benefits and accumulated benefits for a total of 250,000 members. Some of the related challenges included internal processes lacking cohesion; no centralised payroll; each employer sends in its own contribution details to our client; there are over 300 different pay locations and it is also quite common for employees to be employed at more than one location. Our client had installed an administrative system three years previously (the most installed system in Australia for corporate superannuation). It can support multiple Superannuation and Pension plans and is extremely flexible, allowing users to easily define structures that meet their administrative, financial and reporting requirements. However, our client was experiencing several deficiencies in the system and ultimately was not seeing the return on investment they required. In fact, they had to divert additional staff to overcome the processing deficiencies, therefore investing further in the system. Our client decided to carry out a review of the administration system in November 2001 and based on IQ’s strong industry expertise they contracted a team of IQ staff to develop a solution. IQ was chosen based on their operational excellence and product independence. Our Innovative Solution Over a period of four months, a full analysis of our client’s environment was carried out onsite. A solution was proposed to the client’s management, developed, and accepted. IQ successfully managed the following major items: · Copied 130,000 members who only had one membership to a new fund · Combined 50,000 multiple memberships down to 20,000 members · Ran a complete test annual review in 18 hours · Carried out all the relevant audit checks Our client no longer needed additional staff to carry out multiple updates of members records in multiple environments nor do they need to migrate to another system. The work IQ carried out extended the system’s lifecycle by up to five years. The Annual Review process now runs in under 24 hours rather than the 6 weeks it previously took. A typical cost of migration for a fund of this size is $2m. This project costs the Client $200,000. Alternate system enhancements proposed would have cost our client in the order of $400,000 to $600,000.
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