Although GoldMine was not initially designed as a financial services solution, its inherent flexibility as a workflow and data collection platform gave us an ideal answer to a fairly complex technological and logistical problem, says Krish Ramiah, SA Quantum executive director responsible for employee benefits operations.

As a financial services company we were not really set up to track and trace our clients provident and pension fund members. So we had to create new operational systems, with a call centre-based front end that could take calls from members, a database foundation in the middle that would enable us to store and validate member details, and a back office environment that would administer payment to validated claimants.

That entailed three separate technology systems. The first would be a PABX-based call centre. The second would be a customer data collection solution. And the third would be a back-office Employee Benefits system with integrated financial system.

And then we stumbled across GoldMine in a demonstration by our IT partner, iTech North. We liked what we saw and asked FrontRange for a demonstration related to our need to integrate member information from the front to the back office essentially from identification to payment. And on the basis of that demonstration, we now have one of most effective and cheapest integrated tracking systems in the industry.

Changes had to be made to GoldMine specifically in the area of electronic data, document validation and strict security functionality.

But it was a question of customisation rather than re-programming - moving some fields and files, Ramiah says. The basic product and service that we received allowed us to implement and be in production within 60 days.

FrontRange Solutions (SA) GM for product, Paul Bornhutter, says that going live that fast was made easier because SA Quantum knew exactly what it wanted the software to do. SA Quantum works with a number of medical schemes, life companies and investment managers for and on behalf of the pension and provident fund under administration. So it knows what the system shortcomings are in the industry at large, and was able to design something that would avoid the pitfalls.

And because GoldMine and the rest of the FrontRange ecosystem of products is based on the logic of workflow and project management, which underpin all activities in business, it is intuitively useful in most situations outside of its original market sector.

Another critical factor in SA Quantums choice of GoldMine was cost. We are a young company, having been founded only in 2003. And we were moving into unfamiliar financial services territory so we had to keep our initial investment in the solutions that we chose as low as possible. GoldMines purchase price was a big factor in enabling us to do that.

Also, FrontRanges policy of allowing ten days of grace while we worked out our specifications meant that we could go from purchase to live without massive external consultation costs, he concludes.