Banco de Previsión Social (BPS) is the Uruguayan institution in charge of planning, coordinating and administrating social security for industry, commerce, agriculture and cattle, construction, and State-dependent workers, among other industries.
BPS started undergoing a management reform which involved the development of an IT system for issuing receipts and making service-related payments.
In his closing activities report, Arturo Gomeza, Project Manager of Toward the Third Millennium acknowledged that, "For the first time in the history of the BPS, a process to manage all banking services in a unified way, has been obtained".
The Bank works with more than 800 thousand clients to whom it renders different types of services that range from economic assistance (construction, pensions, home-based work), to subsidy-related assistance (during periods of unemployment, sickness or maternity leave), as well as allocations for families.
After an analysis stage was completed, in which BPS's operations were assessed, they decided to implement a unified IT system for issuing receipts and payment orders. Through this system, called SUEP, a single receipt that included all payments that had not been collected by the user was issued to each person.
Prior to this, BPS used to issue a receipt for each service and to each person. Each of these payments had their own payment timetable, which meant that users who benefited from more than one service had to collect the money on different payment dates, according to the service.
Receipt issuance involves about 100 tasks embracing different operations, as well as the critical printing stage. In order to organize and check these tasks so that the process would be accomplished within the required time, the Workflow (GXFlow) technology has been used. It is worth mentioning that receipt printing for all receipts - was accomplished within five days, using three printers, which print 90 pages per minute.
There are 1,780 users throughout the country who benefit from the system. It was developed with GeneXus in Visual Fox Pro, and operates in a client/server framework with C/SQL processes using the Oracle database.
Management re-engineering also led to payment decentralization; nowadays, payment is made through 644 BPS branches -connected to the Internet through Data Express lines- which receive payment orders through a massive barcode-based receipt reading. Before this, payment was centralized and the information had to be re-entered.
Likewise, BPS has outsourced the payment system and users can choose locations throughout the country to receive their payments in different institutions such as the Post Office, Anda, Abitab, and Banco de la República branches. Barcode reading enables these institutions to generate a file with payment information, which is then sent to the BPS via e-mail.
The system was set up in modules and user training was implemented parallel to this through the integration of work-teams.
For more information contact Rafael Mon at rafael@artech.com.uy.