Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Pension Agency Improves Service, Internal Efficiency with New Integration Solution
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Government
Customer Profile
The Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA), based in Montgomery, Alabama, manages retirement and health insurance plans for public employees. The company employs approximately 270 people.
Business Situation
The agency wanted its information technology to be more service-oriented to make processes faster and more efficient, and improve customer service.
Solution
RSA installed a solution usingMicrosoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 to help streamline the integration of agency systems.
Benefits
Saves thousands of hours of staff time
Easy to deploy into existing IT systems
Will enable better customer service / “We want to use BizTalk Server to create services and automate processes so when customers call in … they will get information a lot faster than in the past.”
Peggi Douglass, Director of Information Technology Services, Retirement Systems of Alabama
The Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA) manages nearly U.S.$27 billion in retirement and insurance funds for public employees, including teachers and state employees. The agency started modernizing its IT systems in 2003 by using Microsoft®
BizTalk® Server 2004 to help link legacy systems and data sources. More recently, RSA turned to Microsoft partner Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. to implement a new solution that helps automate the complex calculation of benefits to state employees who work beyond the standard retirement age. The solution uses advanced technologies in BizTalk Server 2006 for creating business process services that orchestrate intricate tasks and help facilitate communications between agency systems. This provides flexibility and efficiency that saves the agency thousands of hours of staff time andhelps itprovide more effective service to customers.
Situation
The Retirement Systems of Alabama (RSA) manages multiple statewide retirement and insurance plans for Alabama employees in state government and public educational institutions, as well as thousands of other workers in local, county, and public organizations. RSA serves about 295,000 clients and manages a portfolio, including pension and health insurance plans, valued at nearly U.S.$27 billion. The agency employs approximately 270 people.
The agency performs its work with a wide variety of computer systems, including applications originally developed in the 1970s and 1980s for mainframe computers. While RSA has migrated to smaller and less costly hardware over the years, much of its mission-critical data resides on these legacy systems. The patchwork of systems created enormous inefficiencies for the agency’s staff. So in 2003, the agency made a strategic decision to implement new technology to help link information between various systems and streamline workflow and business processes. It selected Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2004 to help integrate information between different IT systems, so that RSA employees could spend less time on manual, paper-based data entry and analysis tasks.
The implementation of BizTalk Server 2004 was a valuable first step. Following that successful deployment, the agency’s IT staff started planning the next phase in its IT system modernization. In particular, the agency wanted technology that, in addition to linking disparate systems, would also enable a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in which specific business process services could be created and then replicated. These services, in turn, could be reused across various types of IT systems and workflow procedures to help automate more of the agency’s business. For example, the agency wanted to find a way of automating the calculations of distribution payments from its Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP), which is used by state employees who want to continue working past the official retirement age. The agency had to dedicate thousands of hours of personnel time to perform the calculations and make sure the payout data was properly transferred at the right time to the RSA payroll department for distribution.
Solution
Working with Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS), a Microsoft Certified Partner, RSA co-developed the specification and deployed a specific service called Final Distribution Payment (FDP) for automating the distribution calculations in DROP. LRS used Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006to add the newly developed FDP service to its PensionGold® Software. PensionGold helps pension plan administrators automate their data tracking and administrative tasks. The FDP service, which is scheduled to go into full production in late 2005, will initially be used for payments from DROP. Later, it will be expanded to include all distribution payments for plans managed by RSA.
“FDP is the first service that RSA has implemented from a true SOA perspective within our environment,” says Peggi Douglass, Director of Information Technology Services at RSA. “It confirms the potential ofimplementing a service-oriented architecture within our agency and using BizTalk Server to create SOA-based processes for pension administration.”
Benefits
Using BizTalk Server 2006, LRS created a valuable automated service that saves the agency thousands of hours of manual calculation—time that can be redirected toward other jobs and help the agency provide better service to customers. BizTalk Server 2006 has also helped LRS add more flexibility to its PensionGold Software so that it can be more easily modified to fit the specific needs of different agencies. Enhancements in the new version of BizTalk Server will also help RSA deploy and integrate future solutions with existing applications in the enterprise.
Saves Thousands of Personnel Hours
When in full production by early 2006, the new technology will deliver benefits to RSA in the form of thousands of hours of time saved by automating the calculation of DROP benefits, explains Douglass.
“This had been a relatively low-volume but extremely detailed process of calculating the distributions that in the past took our staff at least one hour per account,” says Douglass. This year RSA had about 3,000 clients who were eligible for payments. After working with LRS on its requirements, RSA used the rules engine in BizTalk Server to create a service, installed that service as part of the DROP system, and had it working within half a day.
“The BizTalk Server–enabled solution automates the work that used to be done by 12 employees, allowing us to redirect staff to other projects,” Douglass says. She adds that this also reduces the chances of errors being introduced into the process.
Robert Goska, Assistant IT Director and Chief Architect, says the consolidation and automation of policies, procedures, and data have been “a huge business goal” for RSA, and the BizTalk Server technology has helped the agency move toward that goal.
“Based on what LRS has helped us accomplish on the DROP project, we can move forward in exposing some of our older legacy systems as services that can provide information in new and useful ways,” Goska says. “BizTalk Server provides a bridge that allows newer services to access data from older systems. An example is that we used BizTalk Server to implement the payroll for DROP. We laid out all the steps in the process of paying benefits, then used BizTalk Server to orchestrate calls to Web services that carry out the business logic. This includes finding out what payments need to be made, notifying the distribution system of who is getting paid, and updating account ledgers.”
Easy to Deploy
BizTalk Server 2006 contains new technologies that make it easy to use within enterprise systems. This, in turn, helped LRS integrate the PensionGold FDP service within the RSA systems.
“The new deployment capabilities of BizTalk Server 2006 are critical in supplying the agility we need to making our product a compelling choice to pension administrators,” says Dan Jordan, Director of LRS. “We have to be able to easily install our product inenterprises and ensure that it integrates seamlessly from a workflow perspective. That means PensionGold is not just a financial application, but truly a line-of-business application that can become a more integrated part of the entire enterprise.”
Gary Moore, Manager of Product Development for PensionGold Retirement Solutions at LRS, explains PensionGold uses a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 database. The fact that BizTalk Server 2006 was designed to work with Microsoft SQL Server 2005—both are part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software—and Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 frees LRS to use the latest Microsoft technology to create advanced solutions for its customers. “Also, all of our code is based on the [Microsoft].NET Framework 2.0, and BizTalk Server 2006 can run these .NET assemblies,” Moore says.
Will Enable Better Customer Service
Douglass says the new features and enhancements in BizTalk Server 2006 will help RSA move its IT architecture from a group of tightly coupled, inflexible systems into a true service-oriented architecture that will help the agency be more efficient and serve its customers more effectively.For example, RSA is considering using it in conjunction with call-center technology used to provide customers with account information.
“We want to use BizTalk Server to create services and automate processes so when customers call in, they will get answers a lot faster than in the past,” Douglass says.
She says BizTalk Server provides the tools for creating composite services that can be combined quickly to create new services, which, in addition to providing better customer service, helps the agency react more quickly to legislative changes that affect account holders.
“While service-oriented architecture is slowly taking hold in the pension administration business, only PensionGold and its BizTalk Server–enabled technology offered the implementation of a single service that helped us with a very specific and critical issue,” she says. “This technology is helping us prepare our information technology to provide better support to the large number of Baby Boomers who will be reaching retirement age in the next few years.”
Microsoft Windows Server System
Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.
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Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, part of Windows Server System, empowers businesses to more efficiently build, manage, and optimize mission-critical business process automation solutions spanning applications, people, and organizations. BizTalk Server 2006 delivers unique, integrated tools to IT professionals, developers, and business analysts that help reduce complexity and achieve new levels of agility in business process design and optimization. With enhanced and simplified deployment, configuration, and management capabilities and a smooth upgrade experience from BizTalk Server 2004, BizTalk Server 2006 is comprehensive, integrated softwarethat helps organizations manage the next generation of adaptive business process automation solutions.
For more information about BizTalk Server 2006, go to: