The Public Service Pensions Fund was founded in 1997 as a direct result of the Laws of Zambia, Act No. 35 of 1996 which stated that it is “an Act to consolidate the law relating to pensions and other benefits for persons employed in the Public Service; and to provide for matters connected therewith or incidental to such consolidation.”
This means that the Public Service Pensions Fund Board (PSPFB) is responsible for pension matters for all pensionable Public Service employees contributing to the Public Service Pensions Fund. To this day PSPFB makes good on its Vision Statement: ‘to be the best public pension scheme dedicated to providing optimum and sustainable benefits to members, retirees, pensioners and beneficiaries’.
The organisation is overseen by a board of directors comprising 14 members, supported by a management committee with an additional five members. Meeting up to eight times a year, the preparation for leadership meetings team at PSPFB was taking too long and costing too much, as Emmanuel Chimuka, head of IT department explains:
“Meetings were obviously an operational necessity but we had been producing the board packs manually, which was hugely time intensive and costly, not only in terms of the printing costs but also in delivering the board packs to disparately located board members across the region. We felt that technology could help us with these issues and turned to BoardPacks in September 2016.”
After trialling the product for a brief period, BoardPacks was implemented fully at PSPFB in November 2016. Roll-out was straight forward and BoardPacks proved popular from the off.
“Our board members all have different levels of technical understanding, but BoardPacks is so intuitive and easy to use that they were able to get the hang of it with minimal training,” continued Emmanuel Chimuka. “We are currently mostly using the Meetings and Knowledge modules, that allows board members to access all relevant PSPFB information quickly and securely, but over time we will be looking to deploy additional BoardPacks modules.”
Since BoardPacks has been in use at PSPFB it has brought about immediate benefits for the administrators that create board packs for meetings, and also for the board members that attend them.
“The time savings that have come from no longer printing and manually collating paper-based board packs have been invaluable to the administration teams that help prepare our board meetings,” said Emmanuel Chimuka. “It has also saved on delivering those paper packs to board members, which was no small undertaking, with board members located all over the region.”
BoardPacks has streamlined the entire meeting process at PSPFB, giving board members access to all the relevant information more quickly and securely than before, as Emmanuel Chimuka concludes:
“Sending board packs digitally to our board members is a much smoother process and means they receive the documents in plenty of time to read and digest them. Sometimes previously it would take too long to get the documents delivered and it wouldn’t leave enough time for board members to prepare properly for the upcoming meeting. There is also the improved security that comes with BoardPacks. A paper board pack can be left around and seen by people it was not intended for, but distributing it electronically and with BoardPacks’ security features, it ensures confidentiality.”
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