Success Stories

Customer Success Story –
The State of Connecticut, Teachers Retirement Board (TRB)

About CT TRB Background

The Teachers Retirement Board (TRB) is a State Agency in Connecticut, whose mission is to obtain adequate funding to pay all benefits, to effectively administer the State Teachers’ Retirement System, to protect and administer the statutory rights and benefits of its members, and to provide pre/post retirement services.

In 1999, TRB implemented the Manage Membership Services (MMS) portion of Pension Gold for their Active Teacher member base of approximately 51,000. They had approximately 21,000 retired teacher members. TRB also anticipated growth for the future.

TRB purchased Pension Gold (P/G), a software package for administering the Teachers Retirement. Based on actual requirement analysis, TRB determined that some enhancements were required for the P/G Benefits Payments Module for the software to provide the full potential for TRB.

The Challenges

TRB maintained two different Databases; one for Active Teachers and another for Retired Teachers.  Earlier, another vendor was contracted for rewriting the Active Teachers Retirement (ATR) component from the mainframe on to a Client Server platform. However, the Benefit Payment Module (BPM) was not a part of that rewrite and still remained on the legacy mainframe.

The problem faced by TRB was that the newly developed ATR system required accessing by the BPM every time a benefit payment is processed for certain verification and validation functions. With 21,000 retired teachers records needing constant access to ATR were slowing the system and increased the processing time.

Some of the complexities faced by TRB were:

• BPM being a30-year old application, getting enhancements and modification done to it is more complex and expensive
  
• There was no facility and screens to enter data regarding Nominated Beneficiaries and dependents etc in the mainframe based system

• A major problem with the system was TRB was unable to know how many checks were cashed in the number of checks sent to the beneficiaries.  This resulted in checking being prepared for beneficiaries who were no alive.

• The system produces lot of redundant and duplicate data due to the VSAM database structure.

• There was no provision for storing the historical data like addresses, cost of living etc.  TRB was forced to maintain a tape/cartridge back up for these functions which was cumbersome.

• With limited staff numbers, TRB was hard-pressed to handle these issues manually.

TRB could not resolve these issues using their internal IT staff as these staff were limited in number to handle these complex issues in addition to their day-to-day responsibilities.

The Paradigm Solution

Paradigm won the contract with TRB for customizing the Benefit Payment Module integration the Active Teachers Retirement System.  This was after a competitive bid process in which Paradigm was selected based on the comprehensive functional and technical solution proposed by Paradigm for the project followed by excellent customer references of Paradigm’s earlier work, fully matured execution model architecture, a comprehensive project plan and the qualification of the proposed project personnel.

In addition to the above, Paradigm offered a competitive price advantage. A combination of all the factors was instrumental in Paradigm winning the contract with TRB.

Paradigm’s solution to TRB consisted of the following:

• A highly-skilled professional team of 12 IT specialists to be onsite at TRB to compete the work.
• Analyze the TRB requirements thoroughly for the integration work along with other functional and technical requirements
• Customize of the Benefit Payment Module and part of MMS to suit TRB requirements based on the analysis and the requirements defined.
• Data conversion and loading from mainframe system to client/system based PensionGold system.
• Interface development and testing
• Reports development and test ring
• Successful implementation
• User Training and world-class documentation
• Warranty Support

Paradigm successfully executed the above project to TRB’s utmost satisfaction in just 12-month timeframe.
 
Benefits and Gains achieved by the Client

When Paradigm competed the project “on-time” and on-budget”, TRB was thoroughly impressed by the excellent implementation of the application with the best dedication by Paradigm.

Following are some of the benefits achieved by TRB:

• Integration of BPM with the Mainframe system has helped TRB a great deal in handling their member data
• Complete Active and Retired Teacher functionality is streamlined:
• TRB could create 12 Payrolls for regular Retirees, 1 Payroll for new Retirees and 4 Payrolls for Health checks in a year
• With the new system, TRB could process benefits data related to 24,500 teachers and $70 Million Payroll.
• Mainframe system used to allow only a hard copy back up.  With the new system, they are able to have an electronic back up which has made the work much simpler
• TRB could get a daily update on the clearance of checks sent to the beneficiaries. This has regulated earlier problem of check encashment by unauthorized persons and saved Tax-payer money
• The object oriented design of the new application allows scalability and frequent system enhancements

“Paradigm is a strong IT company offering real solutions to real problems while building a rock solid relationship with their customer.  Their ability to meet or exceed our expectations assured that we would most certainly consider them for future IT needs”. – Darlene Perez, TRB Benefits Manager.

“Each team member was quite obviously selected carefully, as they carried forward the company’s sense of professionalism and dedication to completing the project on time and within budget.  They each applied an exemplary work ethic in every task assigned to them, and openly applied and shared their time-proven processes and methodologies with us.  No request was impossible and no problem was left unsatisfactorily addressed.  They were flexible enough to accommodate unexpected project twists, yet unwavering enough to get the job done, often introducing appropriate automation tools to accomplish our objectives”– Susan Biron, IT Manager, TRB