Understanding Plan Implementation and Plan Aliases

The final product of a calculation—a benefit amount in all its optional forms—depends on several components, such as service, final average earnings, vesting, and early and late retirement factors. The rules that you define for individual functions provide values for these components. These rules are interdependent. For example vesting may depend on service, and the benefit formula may depend on both vesting and service.

To ensure that results are available when needed, a calculation must process the benefit components in the proper order. For example, if vesting is dependent on service, then you need to know how much vesting service an employee has before starting the vesting calculation.

The final step of a plan implementation is to put all the function results that you create in a sequence to form the final calculation jobstream. The jobstream provides a high-level overview of a plan; it consists of the separate processes in the correct order.

You then place the plan in the system's overall list of plans. Until you add the plan to this list, many fields on other pages that prompt against pension plans do not recognize the plan as a valid value. Because the pension plan list also establishes the plan order when a calculation encompasses multiple plans, the page where you maintain the list is the Order Plan page.

Finally, you need to define aliases to calculate a plan's normal retirement date (NRD), early retirement date (ERD), and other specific plan information. Many of the functions have parameters that refer to this information, so you cannot run calculations until you create these definitions.