Your Implementation Plan

Setting up your plan rules is a complex task. During your detailed analysis, you look closely at your existing administration practices.

The analysis should be from the top down. That is, you look at broad functional areas of your rules and map them to the system's 19 core functions. Determine which function results you need and what their processing order is. At the end of this first step, you have a list of the function results you need.

Start with the first function result in your processing order, and analyze the specific plan rules that you are implementing. Continue this process through the entire jobstream. At the end of this step, you have a list of all the definitions and groups you need.

Go back to the beginning and start examining the definition parameters. You'll discover other lower-level modules that are needed. These modules are discussed in "Understanding Pension Variables, Rules, and Tables."

Continue breaking down all the plan components until you have a complete inventory of the modules you need and you understand their interrelationships. After you complete your analysis, use diagrams as a road map for entering the data into the system.

This analysis may have the additional benefit of identifying practices that don't conform to the plan document. It is also an opportunity to codify any administrative practices which are implicit rather than documented.