Federal Employment Agency: Providing higher-quality citizen services more quickly with electronic document management

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• Process Control & Optimization

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The German Federal Employment Agency (BA) was struggling to manage claims for statutory benefits using its primarily paper-based processes. The agency had to transport and store around 3.5 billion physical documents, which was time-consuming and inefficient. The onset of the global financial crisis in 2007 led to a rapid increase in demand for the BA's services, with the agency receiving 700,000 claims and enquiries per day. This put a strain on the BA's existing processes and made it difficult for the agency to meet the needs of its citizens efficiently.

The German Federal Employment Agency, Bundesagentur für Arbeit (BA), is headquartered in Nuremberg and maintains an extensive nationwide network of employment agencies and branch offices. Its employees provide placement services for on-site employment and training vacancies and consulting services for vocational training and continued education. The BA is also responsible for the creation and maintenance of programs of vocational training, vocational continued education, and vocational integration of disabled persons. Its responsibilities include paying unemployment, insolvency allowance and child-care benefit. The BA also conducts labour market research and compiles statistics on the labour market. The BA comprises the head office in Nuremberg, 10 Regional Directorates (Regionaldirektionen), 156 Employment Agencies, 600 branch offices, and 303 job centers that are run by local agents in urban and rural districts. Additionally, there are special agencies: Family Benefits Office (Familienkasse), International Placement Service (Zentrale Auslands- und Fachvermittlung - ZAV) in Bonn, Institute for Employment Research (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung - IAB) in Nuremberg, Staff College of the BA (Führungsakademie der Bundesagentur für Arbeit - FBA), University of the BA, IT System House for the BA’s IT systems, BA service house (service provider to the BA). The BA’s duties are carried out by 100,000 staff.

With support from IBM Global Business Services, the BA deployed a high-performance electronic document management solution known as eAkte, which is powered by IBM Watson Foundations software. The solution is based on IBM FileNet Content Manager software and plays a crucial role in paving the way towards a paperless office for all branches. The BA also introduced a series of digital workflows around its key business processes – such as the relevant steps that must be completed between receiving a claim and the citizen receiving payment. This approach ensures that the correct, most efficient practices are always followed. Set up according to the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the solution is designed to reduce processing times and enhance service quality. Today, each document that BA receives is scanned and transferred to the electronic document management solution, ready for processing by administrative staff across all branches.

• The BA began seeing the benefits of the solution after just a couple of weeks, and now manages more than 100 million documents electronically.
• Electronic document management eliminates the need for the BA to transfer files by post and rent archive rooms for document storage, enabling the agency to unlock huge cost savings.
• Staff can access files extremely quickly and no longer have to manually search documents to find the correct section to update, dramatically cutting processing times.

• The BA now manages more than 100 million documents electronically.
• The agency is now receiving 700,000 claims and enquiries per day.