South Australia’s StatewideSuper has implemented an IQ Group tailored electronic application to automate the processing of non-standard electronic files from employers to its core back-office processing platform.

IQ Group’s Contribution Loading Interface (CLI) is being used by StatewideSuper to resolve a back-office processing issue between its existing electronic business solution for employers and internal back-office processing platform. Employers were reluctant to reformat superannuation files into the standard format required by StatewideSuper’s employer gateway, instead preferring to email or transfer via clearing houses and payroll providers or FTP scanned copies of paper files.

As these ‘electronic’ forms were received from employers, they then had to be re-keyed individually into the back-office application, increasing the processing time and potential error rates, while maintaining manual processing and administration procedures. In effect, an electronic system was reduced to a paper format operation.

For StatewideSuper’s Operations Manager, Stuart Brown, solving this back-office processing issue was an opportunity to undertake an assessment of related challenges.

“Over 75 per cent of our employers have less than three staff on board and there is little incentive for them to adopt another layer of administration to enable us to process their paperwork. We wanted to solve these administrative challenges and continue to enhance our customer service outcomes for members.”

“We needed to partner with a superannuation industry and technology specialist that could assess the issues we were facing with our existing back-office processing software and provide the necessary recommendations we needed to solve the issue in a tight timeframe.” said Stuart Brown, Operations Manager, StatewideSuper.

During a 12-week period, IQ developed a set of 18 mapped file types for the Contribution Loading Interface (CLI) specifically tailored for the existing platform by deploying an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) solution. This allowed any electronic file from an employer to now be corrected in the new iqCLI interface and automatically processed to the administration platform. Importantly, the new interface also allowed verification and straight through allocation of each individual member payment amount.

To date, the iqCLI application has reduced batch processing efforts of the team markedly. In the first 30 days, over 17,000 employer contributions, over 10,000 files and over 85,000 members were processed to 18 mapped file formats.

“An example of our time and cost savings relate to on e particular monthly batch that was taking three to four days to manually re-key and process from a paper submission. With our new iqCLI electronic format we can process that batch in one to two hours. That’s over 90 per cent operational improvement for that one batch alone,” said Brown.

“We believe that overall we are benefiting from a 20 per cent productivity improvement and expect that this will continue over the life of the application,” he continued.