Data exchange automation
Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead
The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is a Royal Borough of Berkshire, in South East England. It is one of four boroughs entitled to be prefixed Royal and is one of six unitary authorities in its county, which has historic and ceremonial status.
Royal County of Berkshire Pension Fund
The Royal County of Berkshire Pension Fund is part of the Local Government Pension Scheme and is administered by the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.
Overview
The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (RBWM) is the administering authority of Berkshire Pension Fund, a large pension fund administered by a small team, with an administrator-to-scheme member ratio of 1:4,673.
In a strategic review of its processes, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead identified that, while its systems have become automated over the years, its payroll data transfer activities were still an extremely manual process, amounting to an estimated 12 days of effort each month.
Similarly, the Royal County of Berkshire Pension Fund struggled to update member data efficiently. This affected the delivery of a quality service, due to difficulties in obtaining timely and accurate data submissions from employers.
Although the RBWM and the Pension Fund were facing different challenges; automation of payroll processes, and improvements to administration efficiency; the solution was the same for both: an automated Data Exchange portal.
i-Connect from Heywood Pension Technologies was chosen to solve both of these challenges.
The solution: i-Connect
i-Connect is an automated data exchange portal that provides benefits to both Pension Funds and their employers.
It reduces the cost and risk associated with processing pension data by automating the submission of data to pension schemes.
i-Connect improves the flow of data from payroll to pensions, minimising the need for manual intervention.
Solution overview:
- Reduces both effort and costs in supporting the Pension Fund’s administration team
- Helps address Pension Reform obligations and meets The Pensions Regulator’s code of practice on record-keeping
- Removes the annual end-of-year return.
- Provides a simple, secure and efficient process for transferring and submitting data to a pension administration system
- Allows for future scheme changes
- Identifies changes to the workforce automatically
- Automates the creation of tasks and pension records
The implementation
Working in close collaboration with the Pension Fund’s administration team and i-Connect teams, the RBWM payroll team tested its i-Connect solution with 15 employers.
After uploading its data file onto i-Connect, the RBWM completed its end-of-year return to the pension fund. This was in contrast to its previous end-of-year returns, which usually ran into July and generated hundreds of queries.
In the first three months, a total of 12,900 member updates were automated, in addition to the monthly uploads of pay and contributions values for circa 3,000 employees
The outcome
Reports reduced by 75%
i-Connect has significantly reduced the number of reports the payroll team now produces, from 735 a year to 180, as well as reducing the number of pension forms that needed to be completed.
Increased savings through automation
The Berkshire Pension Fund and the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead are looking to build on their success; Berkshire Pension Fund is reaching out to other councils and employers in the fund to increase their savings by automating the Data Exchange process for the employers.
Days of effort cut by more than half
The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is now implementing the latest i-Connect multi-payroll functionality to decrease its days of effort further, from two days to half a day per month, by combining the 15 payroll files into one submission.
Key Figures
12,900
The platform was customised with the Fund’s branding, helping to retain a consistent look and feel
3,000
employees across 15 payrolls pay and contribution values uploaded
76%
After a 12 week testing window, the fund were ready to meet an August deadline for launch
0.5 days
per month of effort, compared to 12 days before implementation
The benefits
Fast, secure submission of monthly payroll data
Significantly reduced administrative burden
Efficient membership data updates
Improved service to members
Productivity gains for both the administration team and employers
"i-Connect allows the Pension Fund to automate a number of our procedures, reducing administration time, while the regular and secure transfer of data has dramatically improved quality.
We are still monitoring the results; however, the pilot has proven successful with a further four of our employers, amounting to a further 9,000-plus pension records, now looking to adopt i -Connect in the next year."
- Technical Analyst
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