A closer look at SAP for Social Protection

As you may know, there’s a well proven solution for social services handling, going with the name of SAP for Social Protection, built for performance and being capable of handling big data. In this blog, I would like to shed some light on the underlying processes and how they are being used.

While there are many different social benefits, and legislation is different in all countries, at the end it always is almost the same process to be executed with different rules for validation and calculation in place.

Starting with a social application, some citizen applies for a social benefit, like health benefit, old age care, unemployment benefit, or any other benefit. This is done through any channel like user friendly web forms designed for occasional users, customer care center, social media, or other channels. After the application got submitted a sophisticated, yet flexible process chain starts. All involved processes are available out-of-the-box, but may be configured and rearranged according to your specific needs and legal regulations. As it is not possible to anticipate all local laws and all social benefits, processes need to be configured, business rules filled in as needed, and processes rearranged to your needs.

A typical process chain looks like this (see diagram above): Data from application and the applicant’s data record is validated. If needed additional data needs to be acquired. These steps get repeated until either data is complete and consistent, or a discontinuation decision is being made. A social case is being created and assigned to a case worker. Depending on your regulations, the case worker may process all further steps, or subsequent steps are being executed automatically while the case worker only handles exceptions. Further steps are fraud detection, eligibility determination, entitlement determination, entitlement calculation. In parallel there is a liability check and deduction calculation if needed. All these steps are heavily decision based, which is being handled by business rules. So different social benefits in different countries basically differentiate through rules, not through the processes. Finally it comes to settlement and accounting.

As circumstances may change at any time, the process chain may be restarted right after application submission.

The system is being setup by a system administrator. As all benefit specifics and law specifics are being handled by business rules, this is a onetime effort. Rules experts, who do not necessarily need to be IT savvy, model the business rules and manage any changes. Rules changes mostly apply when laws are changed. So this typically happens every few months. A rules expert can apply a change and deploy it for productive use without IT support. Case workers handle all social applications. If local laws allow so, they only need to step in in exceptional cases while all straight forward cases are handled automatically.

Several hundred customers around the world are running this solution to manage their social benefits. So it truly is a well proven solution, capable to handle any social services within any legislation.

Interested in more details? If so, please come back to me and ask for an overview session or a workshop.