The Employment Fund – Työllisyysrahasto

Faster processing time in document management

The Employment Fund gained the ability to manage a sharp increase in case volume with no additional staff. This faster processing time in document management couldn’t have succeed without the help of Elinar.

Background

The Employment Fund manages the unemployment insurance payment collection from pension insurance companies. It also finances approximately €1.7 billion of unemployment payments within Finland per year. The Finnish labor system requires that companies that lay off people over the age of 55 are responsible for part of the unemployment costs. They need to pay the costs if an employee does not find a new job within 500 working days.

As an administrative body, the Employment Fund must inspect every layoff involving a person over 55 years old. It then verifies whether various conditions have been met. This determines whether the employer is required to pay part of the unemployment costs.

The need for a document management solution

The recession has had brought in a radical increase in the number of layoffs. That resulted in an increase in the number of cases that an employee had to inspect and handle using complex processes.

The use of existing manual, paper-based processes would have resulted in the need to recruit many new inspectors. This would have carried a significant cost increase. The implementation of a powerful document management solution solved this challenge.

The benefit of the solution

The Employment Fund gained the ability to manage a sharp increase in case volume with no additional staff. Because of the integrations between the FileNet Business Process Framework platform and existing IT systems, process management is now faster and more streamlined.

Inspectors can view all relevant information easily in one system instead of fetching information and papers from multiple sources. Management can now view the overall situation easily and react to possible deviations and delays in a timely manner.

Technical implementation of the solution

The Employment Fund coped with a significant increase in the number of cases. It engaged IBM Business Partners Elinar and Arrow ECS Finland Oy to help them to create a document management system.

The Employment Fund moved existing paper-based processes to FileNet P8 Platform software. That’s why they coped with an increase in the number of cases that had to be inspected. The solution enables the client to manage its document-centric processes.

The core solution is the FileNet Business Process Framework application. FileNet eForms software extends it and also some custom Ajax code gives a good user experience.

Other IBM components included in the solution are:

  • Lotus Quickr software
    Provides office document management capabilities.
  • Content Collector for Email software
    Enables the fund to archive email and also decreases the volume of information on its Microsoft Exchange server.

Elinar's reference The Employment Fund

The Employment Fund (also known as The Unemployment Insurance Fund) was founded in 1998 and is based in Helsinki, Finland. Its main function is to fund unemployment insurance benefits to the residents of Finland. The Unemployment Insurance Fund and Education Fund merged in 2019 to form the Employment Fund.

"We gained the ability to manage the sharp increase in case volume with no additional staff."

A man working in a building site

Solution tech summed:

  • IBM_FileNet P8 Platform V4.5
  • IBM_Lotus Quickr V8.5
  • IBM_FileNet Business Process Manager V4.5.0 and Business Process Framework V4.1
  • IBM_Content Collector for Email V2.1.1 software
  • IBM_FileNet eForms V4.0.2