Administration Service Optimisation
Case Study
We have a client who operates three schemes with 350,000 total members. The administration covers DB and DC, via a mixture of an in-house team and outsourced providers. They felt improvements could be made in terms of reliability, cost and member focus. They also had a question mark around future technology strategy and whether their current providers could support increased pensions flexibility and member education.
Using our service optimisation toolkit, we began with a detailed assessment of our client’s requirements and expectations across all the relevant stakeholders. In this way, we built a very clear picture of what our client wanted, their frustrations and also how they wanted things to change in the future. We achieved this through a number of facilitated workshops and face to face interviews.
We then looked at the administration delivery side of things and conducted a gap analysis between what the ‘as is’ service matrix and what the client actually wanted and expected. Again, we took a proactive approach to this exercise and sat with the delivery teams over several days to understand how they worked, their capability and where they felt improvements could be introduced. In our experience, the best ideas usually come from those who are actually doing the work!
The Gap Analysis threw up many interesting issues, for example:
That communication between the client and providers was not working as well as it should
That there were many service upgrades available that simply hadn’t been switched on
That the client themselves served as the root cause of some elements of service underperformance
That the experience and historic knowledge of the existing teams was incredibly valuable in supporting future optimisation strategy
That cost became less of a factor once the client understood the future benefits and options available to them
The results of our approach have meant that in all cases, the existing administration arrangements have been retained with a clear, mutually defined strategy for the future. Relationships have been invigorated, new investments have been planned and commercial agreements signed off.
“Cosan were extremely helpful in helping to define our future administration needs and provided active support in negotiations with our administration provider. We welcomed their “can-do” approach, attention to detail and ability to get a deal which was beneficial for all parties.”
Martin Lacey, Pension Plan Secretary, Royal Mail Senior Executives Pension Plan