Department of Social Development: Enterprise Performance Management

The South African government's Department of Social Development provides social security and social welfare services to more than 4-million beneficiaries. Its national office provides strategic and policy direction to the nine provincial offices who in turn administer the disbursement of grants to the needy. More than R 20-billion is spent annually on social security.

The main challenges were:

• Inability to process applications in reasonable time. Applications often took between three and six months to process;
• Disorganised pension payout procedures resulting in pensioners spending many hours in queues at pay points;
• Beneficiaries travel long distances to pay points;
• Ever-increasing internal and external fraud—estimated at between 10 percent and 30 percent of the total budget, and
• Limited internal skills have prompted a reliance on contract workers to make decisions on claims.

In November 2000 Accenture was appointed to help develop national norms and standards and an implementation plan to solve these problems. It deployed an eight-member team with strong social security experience to work with the department for nine months. The team visited provincial and local offices to gain an understanding of the challenges in delivering services and conducted workshops to explore new ideas with those dealing with the beneficiaries.

Accenture leveraged on international and local best practice to develop norms and standards to help solve most of the problems. Two UK experts with experience in developing similar solutions advised the team. The project was completed on schedule in July 2001.

The main deliverables included a norms and standards manual, a role-based user guide, a migration plan and a communication plan.

The norms and standards were tabled in Parliament and Cabinet approved the manual. Subsequent implementation of these proposed norms and standards will follow.

The key benefits will include:

• Reduction of time taken to approve application from months to two days;
• Good financial management leading to a reduction in fraud cases;
• Skilled personnel;
• Good governance;
• Operating cost reduction;
• Improved service access channels, and
• Improved conditions—such as security and infrastructure—at pay-points.