Pensions and Benefits Tracking System

State Department of Treasury, Division of Pensions and Benefits:

Background

The Public Employees' Retirement System was established in 1955. The Division of Pensions and Benefits is assigned all administrative functions of the retirement system for investment.

Business Challenge

To redesign and develop a workflow system to be used by the Division of Pensions and Benefits to process the purchasing of retirement time. The original system had become old and outdated and was no longer going to be supported by FileNET. This system, originally developed using the FileNET WorkForce Desktop 4.0 scripting language, needed to be rewritten to use the latest FileNET Visual WorkFlo.

Objectives

  • Redesign and develop a workflow system to manage the retirement process of municipal and state employees.
  • The new system required a tight integration to the IBM Mainframe, Oracle Databases, and UNIX FileNET imaging repositories.
  • A sophisticated automated letter creation module was required for correspondence to state employees.
  • The new system had to be Y2K compliant.

Technical Solutions

Used FileNET Panagon to develop a client-server based solution.

Application

Customized application interface containing all of the needed information for the Purchasing group to process their work. It included imaging which allowed the user to access documents scanned in as well as storing correspondence printed from the custom letter generation service. The applicant would start the process by submitting an application which would generate a work object. As the work object traveled through the workflow, different users would interact with the data. In the event of certain flags produced by that interaction, the system would automatically generate correspondence which was printed on a nightly batch process server. Once the applicant was approved a form was generated and sent to the payroll department so that they could begin deducting the agreed amount from the applicants biweekly or monthly pay checks.

Tools

Visual Basic for customized components. FileNET's IDM Desktop API's and Visual WorkFlo.

Results

  • Applicants are now reviewed and approved 50% faster.
  • Fewer mistakes are made during the process.
  • The administrator now has the ability to reassign workload to different users decreasing the bottleneck when someone is out on sick leave or vacation
  • Users now have timely access to the documents needed to process the work.
  • Pre-defined from letters can be pre-populated from the applicant's information as stored in the FileNET System.
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