The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) is expected to migrate over 2.9million membership records onto the OBS platform by the end of this year as part of its Operational Business Suite project (OBS).

The whole idea is to “convert all documents from paper to digital and to have a backup of digital information,” said Martin Benjamin-Addy, project lead of the Digitisation centre.

The OBS project is a tool to manage and enhance core operational activities, which include registration of employers; establishments and employees/workers; contribution-management; compliance enforcement; and payment of benefits.

At a media facility tour to the Contact Centre, Data Centre and Records Department, officials of SSNIT indicated their resolve to move from the manual way of doing things to digital, and so effectively serve the customer.

The data centre manager John Hagan Mensah emphasised: “We want to change the way we do business, which is why we put up the data centre as part of the OBS; when it is done and eventually launched, a contributor can check and transact everything online”.

He also disclosed that “Before the end of year, at least each regional capital will have an information kiosk that will be stationed at our offices”.

According to Mr. Mensah, the information kiosk will help employers and contributors to check financial statements as well as status of transaction.

For now, SSNIT has two data centres in Accra and Koforidua -- Accra serving as the primary data centre and with the Trust’s 50 offices all connected to that centre.

At the Records digitisation centre, Benjamin-Addy explained to the press that all documents are cleaned to ensure that they are put in the right state for scanning; and added that so far they have scanned over 3million folders and are hopeful they can meet the timeline.

Over the years, contributors have bemoaned the delay of benefits, an accusation John Nimoh, Records Manager explained thus: “Benefits are delayed because all applicants have to go through records, and to forestall this going forward means digitising and moving into an automatic fingerprint system.

“When everything is done, records will be available at all branches,” Nimoh added.

SSNIT has over 140,000 pensioners on its system, who are paid every month with the social security calculated on basic salary.