Payroll enhancements
Clwyd Pension Fund
Clwyd Pension Fund administers the Local Government Pension Scheme for employers across North Wales.
The Fund comprises over 50 employers and around 50,000 active, deferred and pensioner members. Clwyd’s mission is to be known as forward-thinking, responsive, proactive, and professional, providing excellent customer-focused, reputable and credible service to all of their members.
Overview
Clwyd Pension Fund are a long-term customer of Heywood, having used our pension administration platform Altair for over 20 years.
The Fund have been using Altair Pensioner Payroll to pay their pensioner members since 2008, and have been benefitting from the operational efficiencies it provides by holding both admin and payroll data on one system.
Such is the nature of local government, employees who move between departments or job roles are often administered as a ‘new’ employment, and as such another pension benefit is created. The knock-on effect of this is that when employees come to retire, although having worked for one employer they have multiple employments for the purpose of their pension, each with their own benefits feeding into their combined pot.
We know that pensioners prefer one single payment to be made to them, and due to the nature of the administrative set-up, this hasn’t always been possible. For the Fund, it had been an ongoing challenge and drain on resources to deliver multiple payments, each with a separate tax note to retirees. From a Fund and from a customer experience point of view, it would be far more efficient to make one combined payment.
The project
From our experience of working in the pension industry, and from reviewing customer feedback, Heywood conducted research on how to improve processes that would drive efficiency with customers and save them time.
Aware of the Funds appetite to streamline processes, and desire to deliver an enhanced member experience, Heywood approached Clwyd Pension Fund with our newly developed Payroll Multiple Employments and Enhanced Admin to Pay solutions.
Payroll Multiple Employments modifies the way Altair stores payroll data for multiple employers by developing an enhanced solution to the way payroll data is held, linking it directly to the member employment allowing for one combined payment to be made, simplifying Annual Pension Increase and Payroll Financial costing processes within Altair.
Enhanced Admin to Pay passes data to payroll directly from the benefit calculations, eliminating manual input, thus reducing risk and saving effort by automating the creation of payroll data.
Following its development, Heywood’s customer relationship manager proactively sought to bring our Payroll Enhance solution to the Fund, which was met with enthusiasm and a desire to resolve a long-term challenge. Keen to test out the new payroll solutions, Heywood’s product experts delivered a live demonstration to the Fund, which was met with positive feedback and as such the project moved along to the implementation and testing stage.
As part of the implementation, the structure of the way payroll data was held within the administration platform was updated by Heywood, followed by the delivery of training sessions before passing over to the Fund’s in-house team for user acceptance testing. This allowed the Fund to get comfortable with the new solution, with a dedicated Heywood consultant on hand to assist with follow-up queries.
The results
The payroll enhancement project delivered three areas of improvement to Clwyd Pension Fund.
Payroll Multiple Employments now allows benefits from multiple employments to be paid under a single payroll record. Pension benefits payable are held on the employment they relate to allowing for the seamless processing of pension increase.
Payroll Arrears processing introduces a history of element rates allowing date-driven calculations of rate changes which removes the requirement to manually calculate and input arrears and part-period adjustments.
Enhanced Admin to Pay increases the amount of information passed from the benefit calculation to payroll and provides validation of pension start dates to prevent pension information being passed to payroll. This facility also allows users to process retirements to payroll in bulk whereas the previous version of Admin to Pay required records to be processed individually.
Following full deployment of the payroll enhancements, the Fund immediately benefited from a reduction in the time taken to administer £4.4m of payroll benefits per month.
The time taken to administer £4.4m payroll benefits per month has dramatically reduced
The Clwyd Pension Fund experience
"During the implementation stage, we had continuous support from the Payroll team at Heywood. Whilst testing the enhancements any questions and issues we had were answered and resolved quickly, this helped speed up our testing process. New Payroll documents were created on our Live and Test systems. We were given an implementation date and the Payroll team were flexible to change this as and when if we needed to conduct further testing. This helped to create confidence throughout the team to ensure we were happy with the new enhancements.
We went live with the enhancements in March 2023. In April 2023 we ran PI using the new enhancements and this was a massive improvement for us as the Payroll team. This saved us several days worth of time as the amount of manual errors we had to work through were greatly reduced. This enabled us to process business as usual payments a lot earlier in April than we usually would which benefitted the team and our members.
The Bulk Retirement Processor is easier and quicker to use than the previous Admin to Payroll interface. On a day to day basis, the Online Payroll Arrears Calculation has saved 2-5 minutes on average, per case, as manual calculations are no longer required for arrears."
Kyle Williams
Principal Pensions Officer