"With the economy the way it is, our staff was overburdened," said Steve Wischer, Internet project manager with the Project Management Office at the Texas Workforce Commission. "The new system takes some of that burden off of our staff. This generated some internal and external cost savings."
Launched in August 2002 with design assistance from private companies Accenture and MMC Group, the system supports varying needs of claimants and handles a claim load that has almost doubled to well over one million claims during the last year. Its technical architecture can process claims without eligibility issues and generate benefit payments without any human intervention, which is a huge savings to the state.
For claims with eligibility issues, the system generates dynamic fact-finding questions, then automatically creates cases and assigns them to staff. Information that claimants entered on the Internet is available in real time to customer service representatives using the legacy mainframe benefits system. A completed claim automatically generates the monetary determination to the claimant and the notice of claim to the claimant's last employer.
The system features real-time integration with the mainframe systems and the TWC's Internet job matching system. Upon submission of an Internet claim, the system transfers the claimant to the job-matching system and pre-fills the claimant's demographic and work-history information from the claim. It was also designed to support multilingual access -- English and Spanish are the current options. It also incorporates World Wide Web Consortium and Federal Section 508 accessibility standards.
