Business Edge Systems (BES) has been awarded the contract to develop and implement a fingerprint administration system for TEBA Limited that allows the company to capture and verify fingerprint forms. TEBA administers fingerprints for its mining clients and for Rand Mutual Assurance (RMA).
TEBA, a private company that provides employment support services to labour-intensive industries such as mining, construction and agriculture, currently verifies the annual Certificates of Life (COL) issued by insurance company, RMA. These certificates serve as confirmation for RMA to pay out pensions to mining industry employees injured in the course of their employment history.
TEBA required a database solution to serve RMA`s needs cost-effectively and more efficiently, and rid TEBA of its backlog of outstanding fingerprint forms that still requires capture and verification.
"The old fingerprint verification system is not consistent with TEBA`s new technology infrastructure, not supported and difficult to maintain. The fingerprint verification process is also extremely time-consuming, the system is difficult to develop and extend, and not scalable to handle the large volume of requests we receive from different organisations," says Wendy Kraemer, manager of Manpower Data Centre at TEBA.
The new fingerprint administration system project, managed by BES, is part of the company`s ongoing system development at TEBA. Business Edge is designing and implementing the scalable fingerprint identification facility using Delphi and IBM`s Universal DB2 on a Microsoft Windows platform. Being TEBA`s preferred technologies, the solution will be simple to support and maintain by TEBA`s in-house IT department.
"While the first phase of the fingerprint identification solution will still require manual intervention by TEBA technicians, it is designed with the aim of including further automation at a later stage using biometric technology," says Karen Malkin, account director at BES.
"It does, however, offer significant benefits in its first phase. With the new system, TEBA will be able to verify that the unique fingerprints of the current RMA pension recipients collected by TEBA field workers in rural communities match those of the workers originally captured on the old system," she says.
New beneficiary details and fingerprint images can be effortlessly captured on the new system, and linked for future Certificate of Life verification. All unknown and mismatched data will be flagged for reporting to RMA.
"RMA is paying large amounts of money into beneficiaries` accounts without sometimes knowing whether they were still alive or really exist," says Philip Stoop, Manager Pensions, at RMA.
"With TEBA`s new verification system in place, RMA will be able to take the necessary steps to suspend, continue or commence the correct payment of pensions. This will especially root out fraud and accident cases and ensure that the pension funds reach the correct people," he says.
The new fingerprint administration system will allow TEBA administrators to log into a secure system that is access controlled. Personal data of workers, pensioners and dependants can be maintained and linked to fingerprint images and fingerprint classification codes. The new database will have extensive search capabilities that allow users to filter beneficiary information into different categories and classifications such as name, district, country, mine, closest TEBA office and specified classification codes of one or more fingers.
The software will be able to provide detailed reports of individuals, dependants and relatives, employment history, specific classification codes, search results, fingerprint images. The system will allow TEBA to print standard TEBA fingerprint forms for its field workers, and RMA can print and analyse information relating to COL information, eg matches, mismatches and unknowns.
"The solution now being developed by BES allows TEBA and the RMA to retain control over their business processes which will be supported by the fingerprint administration system, taking advantage of TEBA`s infrastructure. The project`s duration is expected to be four months and will be completed in December 2002," concludes Malkin.
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