Transnet Pension Fund, a business unit of Transnet Limited, has successfully completed one of the largest conversion projects ever undertaken in SA, using the Sapiens emerge development architecture from JMR Software.
"Two projects were initiated via a partnership between Transnet Pension Fund, arivia.kom and JMR Software," said Leon Theron, Sales and Marketing Director of JMR Software.
"The first project involved providing a suitable employee benefit administration system that addressed Transnet`s need to move its employees from a Defined Benefit (DB) to a Defined Contribution (DC) employee benefit fund. It also included the management of the distribution of individual investment portfolios on behalf of each of Transnet`s 98 000 members that chose to convert to the new fund. The project was completed in four months," he added.
In the second project, three different employee benefit applications had to be moved from a mainframe to an AS 400 environment - a process that took just six months. The conversion went extremely smoothly, with several million records being balanced to the last cent. Processing time per transaction has been improved by approximately 40%.
Flying in the face of the reality that as many as 70% of development projects are unsuccessful or not completed on time, the state-owned enterprise chose to go the route of developing an in-house application using Sapiens architecture. Based in the UK, Sapiens is a provider of strategic end-to-end solutions for the rapid development of mission-critical software applications, particularly in the insurance and banking industries.
Transnet Pension Fund investigated a number of options before deciding to develop an in-house application using Sapiens. These included the purchase of administration systems from vendors in the US and SA.
The US applications were costly, and because they were specifically tailored to that country`s regulatory environment, would have to be radically modified to address SA`s regulations. We were also not keen to depend on overseas support," said Attie Bower, IT Manager of Transnet.
"Locally, we could not find a product that could cope with an administration environment of our magnitude."
The decision to develop an application in-house has resulted in a world-class employee benefit administration system that allows for daily unit pricing within flexible investment portfolios. It is a mix of both Transnet and market specific requirements - a system developed to provide for any future eventualities and employee benefit market requirements.
The new system interfaces electronically with the SA Revenue Services, allows for automated electronic inputs from 28 different HR systems and an electronic interface to and from any general ledger. It also tracks benefit payments and allows for electronic fund transfers with a validation process that ensures payments comply with the rules of the Automated Clearing Bureau.
Following the system`s success, the Transnet Pension Fund IT team then undertook to convert the system from the IBM 370 mainframe environment to that of an AS 400. This would not only reduce the licensing fees and processing time, but also enhance the system`s potential future saleability into local or global markets.
The conversion is estimated to have saved the Transnet Pension Fund 30% in processing costs alone.
This migration, one of the largest ever undertaken in SA, was achieved in just six months with a team of just three developers.
"This was made possible by the unique nature of the Sapiens emerge application generator, which being rule driven obviates the need to write pages of code. Changes to data can rather be executed via business rules, which are invoked automatically," Theron said.
According to Bower, Sapiens development methodology suits the ever-changing nature of the employee benefits business.
"Our business changes all the time and we needed a development framework that was flexible enough to adapt our systems to the changing business environment. Sapiens object modular cuts out the time-consuming design and analysis phase in systems development," he said.
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