Sagitec Delivers Software Solutions For Pension Administration And Unemployment Insurance

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Below is our recent interview with David Minkinnen, Senior Partner at Sagitec:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Sagitec?

A: Sagitec Solutions, formed in 2004, is a global technology company helping numerous unemployment insurance (UI) agencies in the United States to solve their technology challenges. In addition to serving the unemployment insurance industry, Sagitec also designs and delivers software solutions for the public pension market and healthcare and life sciences industries. With deep industry experience in software implementation and systems integration, project management, consulting, cloud/hosting and software support, Sagitec is a partner clients can trust to deliver mission-critical IT projects.

Q: What kinds of services do you offer to your clients?

A: Many state agencies are hindered today by challenges related to antiquated technology and the high cost of working with cumbersome, manual processes. Our fully integrated, web-based unemployment insurance tax and benefits solution meets the majority of UI business requirements straight out-of-the-box, while also being extremely flexible to accommodate each state’s unique business rules, policies and requirements.

State UI agencies that have modern IT systems are able to deliver UI services in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. A modernized UI tax and benefits system enhances customer service through intuitive web interfaces, improves overpayment prevention and detection, reduces administrative costs by automating unnecessary manual processes, and allows agencies to incorporate law changes and new technology quickly and seamlessly.

While these operational benefits are enticing, UI IT modernization projects are a major undertaking. According to an industry report, only one in five projects are on time, on budget, and deliver the required major functionality.

Sagitec helps clients modernize their IT applications with a product based approach that evolves continuously mitigating the risk of technical obsolescence and delivers projects on time and on budget with all of the business processes our clients require.

Other than implementing UI, pension and healthcare and life sciences solutions, we also help customers with maintenance and support, project management, change management, training and development, enterprise content and knowledge management, and provide hosting services on Microsoft Azure.

Q: Are you seeing the public sector and UI agencies, in particular, seeking out a particular type of solution?

A: Due to rising hosting costs and the inability to scale or evolve their IT systems in response to increased demand for services and business needs, UI agencies are increasingly seeking Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and cloud-based solutions over on premise hosting.
Sagitec utilizes Microsoft Azure Government to move our clients to a more secure and reliable hosting environment. This method of infrastructure hosting provides our clients immense flexibility to respond to fluctuating demands for service – especially important for the UI industry that has to deal with extreme ebbs and flows of the UI workflow throughout a week, the year and through economic ups and downs of the labor market.

Furthermore, by hosting and maintaining their solutions on Microsoft Azure, we allow clients to quickly update their solutions in response to law and policy changes. The technical framework our solutions are built on allows us to quickly respond to law and policy changes through the use of sophisticated business rules engines and project accelerators and allow us to make changes in days versus months in clients’ legacy systems.

By building on the Microsoft Cloud for Government platform, our clients gain a reliable, stable solution that is backed by our ongoing commitment to serve the public sector. It also provides them heightened agility and scalability. The ability to scale in response to workload surges is improved by auto-scaling up or down to accommodate wide fluctuations in workload with a 99.9 percent monthly uptime service level agreement. This allows UI agencies to respond to increased demand for services when unemployment increases.

Sagitec is currently in the process of designing and developing its cloud-based offering for three other UI agencies in the United States.

Q: You’ve recently implemented the first real cloud-based unemployment insurance tax System in the nation; could you tell us something more?

A: On March 26, 2018, Sagitec and the project team from the South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce (SCDEW) successfully implemented a modernized UI Tax system.

The implementation has been extremely successful in transitioning SCDEW into a customer-centric, self-service UI tax administration agency. SCDEW required a comprehensive, modern, UI Tax system to replace a legacy tax system and integrate with its UI benefits system to streamline UI business processes making these processes more efficient and improving overall data accuracy.

The implementation of Sagitec’s Cloud-Hosted Neosurance™ UI tax solution – one that serves over 105,000 employers, over 1,700 third-party agents, and approximately 100 internal staff users, provides a modern UI Tax solution for SCDEW. The first quarter of 2018 was processed in the new system achieving the following significant results:

• Achieved a 97% self-service adoption rate with over 90,000 employers submitting wage detail records through the tax portal by the reporting deadline significantly reducing paper-based wage filings and increasing data accuracy.
• Achieved 98% self-service adoption rate for employer registrations.
• Achieved an 86% self-service adoption rate for employer account updates.
• Implemented electronic payment processing (ACH debit/credit) replacing paper checks. Over 90% of tax payments were processed using electronic payment processes virtually eliminating paper checks in the first quarter of implementation and significantly reducing processing costs for SCDEW.

Q: Why are these results so significant?

A: Gaining this high of level of self-service adoption rate by employers within the first month of production is quite extraordinary. Usually it takes a three, four or five quarters to gain this level of self-service. Having employer’s access the system using self-service portals provides SCDEW with significant administrative saving by not having to manually enter wages, process payments, register employers, and make changes to employer’s accounts. In addition, the accuracy of the data increases by having the employers and third party agents perform these actions through data validation and rules built into the self-service portals.

Q: What are your plans for the future?

A: Sagitec is committed to delivering services and solutions to the national Labor market to meet current and future business needs. We will continue to invest in our current solution offerings that provide integrated UI tax, benefits and appeals solutions and fraud solutions that use predictive modeling and machine learning to detect fraud. We currently have a 2-3 year product roadmap that define the enhancements and upgrades to our solution offerings to ensure our products stay current with technology and business changes. In addition, we are rolling out new solutions to serve the disability insurance and paid family leave markets. These solution offerings will address new Federal requirements that are impacting Labor agencies across the country.

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