Scotmid Co-operative communicates pension auto-enrolment with Aceni

Scotmid Co-operative operates 350 retail outlets across Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North of England, employing around 5,000 people.

The challenge

Although Scotmid Co-operative’s pension scheme had always been available to employees, there was a low take-up of around 3%. Therefore, when
auto-enrolment was introduced, the pension project team knew they’d have a task engaging and educating employees about pensions.

As the team began to understand the legal obligations of auto-enrolment, it became clear there would be a sizeable task to manage administration of communications. Take an already busy payroll department, add auto-enrolment requirements – for specific communications, at specific points, to specific groups of employees. What do you get? An overwhelming resource constraint.

The team’s time would focus on creating accurate payroll files and employee categorisation, so they would need help to manage the labour intensive tasks of printing, collating and despatching mailings. They also needed to ensure accuracy and monitor the integrity and timely delivery of letters.

Having managed all mailings internally up to then, Scotmid were apprehensive about outsourcing the task. They considered employing extra resource, but this would add costs to an already expensive process.

Aceni, powered by Datagraphic was the solution.

“Working with Datagraphic has been an absolute godsend. It is so reassuring that I can simply upload a file today and be confident that it will be despatched the same or next day.

Payroll Manager, Scotmid Co-operative

Results achieved

• Auto-enrolment mailings printed and delivered for less than it would cost to achieve internally.
• No need to recruit or train additional staff.
• Pre-mailing validations improve the mailing address accuracy.
• Service level agreement ensuring the mailings deliver on time.