SSNIT's OBS deal: Board gives assurance

The board and management of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) have pledged to do everything legitimate to ensure that their Operational Business Suite (OBS) Solution works with maximum effectiveness and efficiency.

Accordingly, they have engaged the local and foreign suppliers of the OBS to provide all the outstanding requirements in the contract and resolve the issues that have come up since the deployment of the system, at no cost to SSNIT.

Controversy

The acquisition of the OBS system by the former administration of SSNIT has generated controversy because of the huge cost and its inability to perform as expected.

While some have argued that the claims by the new management was politically motivated, they pointed out that if the system was working they would not cry foul.  

Stating their commitment to ensure that SSNIT gets value for money, the Director General of SSNIT, Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang, told the Daily Graphic that at the time the contract was signed off as having been completed, a number of the requirements were outstanding.

He said since the deployment of the system, a myriad of issues had come up which had undermined the effective and efficient use of the system.

He noted that it was not that the system was not working at all, but that it was like the case of buying a brand new car which begins to jerk the moment you want to drive the vehicle.

“In such a situation, one cannot say that the vehicle is working smoothly,” he pointed out and said they had engaged the suppliers who had made a written commitment to supply all the undelivered requirements and resolve all the issues at their own expense.

Dr Ofori-Tenkorang said the situation was dire since some clients had started complaining about the poor service rendered by the SSNIT, especially, the generation of wrong information on contributors’ and employers’ accounts, compelling the Trust to resort to manual reconciliation most of the time.

He said out of a total of 304 requirements agreed upon, no provision was made for 126 of them but the suppliers had agreed to provide them as soon as possible at their own cost.

Documents made available indicated that, for instance, under the Benefits Module, 21 of the 47 requirements are yet to be installed while under Compliance and Prosecutions six out of the 51 requirements were not provided. 

Similarly under Contributions, only eight out of 39 requirements have been installed, whereas under Member Registration, 34 requirements were installed, leaving eight outstanding.

For Employer Registration, 18 out of the 32 requirements are outstanding while for Relationship Channel Management (RCM), 16 of the 40 requirements are yet to be provided.

Three out of five requirements under the Business Intelligence Module have been installed, 21 out of 27 requirements under the Portal Module have been provided while under External Integration, only one out of the 12 requirements have been provided for.

Under the Mobile Technology Module all the seven requirements were provided.

Dr Ofori-Tenkorang said the suppliers have been supportive of the efforts of the management to seek redress and had the system fully operational to meet the needs of the SSNIT.

They have further pledged to retrain staff after all the outstanding issues had been resolved.

Comments

Commenting on the matter, the Chairman of the SSNIT Board, Dr Kwame Addo-Kufuor, said the board would approach all the issues with openness and sincerity to ensure that they obtained value for money in the deployment of the OBS Solution system which was not bought off the street but was a turn-key project.

He said if the board wanted to hide anything, they would not have put the matter in the public domain.

Dr Addo-Kufuor stressed that the outcomes of investigations of the security agencies, as well as the study by Price WaterhouseCoopers would be made public to enable the public contribute towards the way forward to enable the SSNIT to serve the interests of workers