Automating admin:
Turning days into hours
Heywood’s automated solutions
Have you ever felt like it is almost too hard to get things done? Is your work dominated by multiple spreadsheets? Do you check information in one place only to have to cross reference it or check somewhere else?
Good automation and workflow can dramatically reduce the amount of time you need to spend on predictable and repetitive administration tasks.
If you ever feel like your job should be easier, we can help.
Lothian Pension Fund
Lothian Pension Fund administers the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) in Edinburgh and the Lothians.
They are an asset-backed and multi-employer scheme with around £10 billion of assets and the second largest LGPS fund in Scotland, serving 88,900 members and 56 active employers.
In March 2017, they became the first UK Local Government pension fund awarded accreditation for the Pensions Administration Standards Association and have held the Customer Service Excellence Award for over 10 years.
Background
Lothian Pension Fund have been a Heywood customer for a number of years, using the Altair platform to cover all aspects of pension administration.
While reviewing and standardising processes, the fund were aware that they had not adopted automation to help achieve their goals, but were unsure where they should start.
They wanted to remove smaller, time-consuming and repetitive activities and ensure that their time and resources focused on:
- Allowing staff to concentrate on complex processes and calculations
- Reducing backlogs
- Providing better customer service to help and guide members
- Meeting increasing legislative demands
Lothian sought Heywood’s expertise to optimise their processes and take away the thinking required to implement changes, rather than trying to work around the system.
An iterative approach
Heywood employ a collaborative approach to automating processes, working with customers to provide options that benefit their needs and resources.
Lothian worked with Heywood iteratively, where the fund added and used new features, providing feedback along the way. Heywood created more elements to adopt, such as complex addresses, activation key statuses and criteria moved into events.
A sense of trust was built during the process, as Lothian could identify improvements at a manageable pace, before adding more automated features.
Processes Lothian wanted to automate included:
- Tenements addresses
- Member activation keys
- Communication methods
The goal of ‘sending communications’ was changed to ‘ensure that communications are received in a timely manner’. As a result, communications were automated across all processes to save time, with other processes retained as manual activities. The iterative approach ensured Lothian were comfortable with and understood each change.
The process optimisation stage asked Lothian to assess practices from a different perspective and confirm that they were useful and delivered value. In one instance, ending a manual process that involved 400 individual lines of data resulted in 100 hours of time saved per year.
Lothian’s goal was to work on ‘admin by exception’, focusing on automating 99% of activities and devoting time to the 1% of ‘hands-on’ cases.
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Immediate benefits
Saving time and money
Lothian realised immediate benefits from the new automated processes by implementing a check for email addresses appended to member records.
The check allowed the fund to reduce postal communications by 72%, saving over £9,500 in post for Deferred Benefit Statements in the first year.
Similar benefits were appreciated by adopting the new starter process, which previously took over 830 admin hours prior to automation. The new process represents an 88% reduction in process time, or 91 days.
Automation has opened so many opportunities for use in other processes, bringing efficiencies for time and cost savings. The new starter process is now taking 2 hours per week where it had previously taken 2 days."
Lothian Pension Fund
How we can help you
A snapshot of other Heywood-automated processes:
- Actives approaching age 75
- Annual Benefit Statements
- Data cleanse
- Mortality screening
Heywood have introduced flexible support arrangements for customers to meet the needs of each fund; from full end-to-end support, to workflow training, written guides and hosted virtual drop-in clinics.
All options provide best practice tips for funds, before building or managing exception processes.
Customers have the option to implement changes or identify any support required, ranging from optimising processes, reconfiguring workflows and setting up new automations.