4 Ways Sagitec’s Enterprise Platform Made Pandemic Unemployment Benefits Programs Possible for States to Implement

With the unprecedented pass of the federal CARES Act to deal with the economic impacts of COVID-19, State Workforce Agencies (SWAs) across the nation scrambled to develop systems that could quickly accommodate millions of Americans suddenly eligible for unemployment benefits.

Using Sagitec’s enterprise platform Xelence, on which we have built the UI tax and benefits system, we were able to rapidly develop and deploy pandemic benefits systems for multiple states with about a 3-week development cycle. This implementation time frame was made possible by our platform and is a remarkably short amount of time for a statewide application to go-live. As many states continue to struggle to process pandemic benefit claims, the PUA solutions built using Sagitec’s Platform was able to help get much-needed money into the hands of citizens in the states that we served. 

We attribute our rapid response to our experienced and knowledgeable labor and employment team, and our robust, flexible, enterprise application development platform. The Platform is at the heart-and-soul of everything we do. Xelence is a software development platform that is flexible, scalable, intuitive and centers our customers around technology evolution. We build cutting edge enterprise solutions and applications on our platform that focus on the unique needs and objectives of our customers.  

While implementing the CARES Act, State Workforce Agencies overcame many technical challenges to quickly bring pandemic benefit solutions live:  

• Urgent and Immediate Demand: The pandemic created an unemployment cliff, and citizens needed State Workforce Agencies to respond immediately with benefits. Most states were required to respond with new or heavily modified software applications in a matter of weeks—work that has traditionally taken SWAs several months or years to develop.  

• High Visibility, Politics, and Media Coverage: The pandemic created such chaos and turmoil that SWAs worked under a microscope. All of the decisions that they were making were very public and highly visible. Media coverage was constant and political scrutiny was challenging to manage. Any mistake and even the smallest issues created a media frenzy, legislative hearings, and protests.

• Ambiguity around Volume and Scaling Requirements: It was unclear how many people would be applying for unemployment benefits, for which programs they would apply to, and for how long claimants would require benefits. While the assumption was that the SWAs needed to be ready to help a lot of people, the volumes were uncertain. Many SWAs faced system crashes and outages, virtual waiting lines, and slow performance.

• Rapid Fire Change: Throughout the pandemic, rules, policies, regulations, and legislation were fluid and evolving. SWAs were, and continue to be, forced to interpret and implement federal and state changes constantly.  

Sagitec’s enterprise platform is a development environment for creating enterprise solutions through a graphical user interface instead of traditional coding. Xelence aims to solve large scale, enterprise application development challenges for organizations that need some of the most complex and sophisticated software solutions to manage complicated business rules, ever-evolving, and high-touch organizations.   

Traditional application delivery is ineffective and cannot keep up with the needs of the digital age. IT leaders that want the freedom to future-proof their organizations should place a platform at the center of their enterprise universe to empower enterprise application developers; rapidly meet new and changing business needs; engage customers through a variety of channels; break down silos and focus on integration throughout the enterprise; and, remove the roadblocks to next-generation IT support.   

By developing solutions built on Xelence, some of our SWA customers could make pandemic benefit programs possible and get much-needed money into the hands of struggling citizens in four ways: 

• Xelence helped overcome “urgent and immediate demand” for an enterprise application by enabling application developers to develop and deliver highly sophisticated solutions with an average of a 3-week development cycle: Sagitec’s Platform capitalizes on the benefits of a drag-and-drop development, and its layered architecture optimizes the ability to meet current and future customer needs.
• We helped overcome the stress of “high visibility, politics, and media scrutiny” by utilizing our Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities to identify and resolve issues quickly: Our platform’s APM capabilities helped application teams troubleshoot, pinpoint, and fix issues in the testing phases and post-production.
• Xelence helped overcome “ambiguity around volume and scaling requirements” by providing the flexibility to scale vertically and horizontally at all levels and exploit powerful features: Sagitec’s Platform is designed for scalability that allowed servers to scale up to meet the peak loads and scaled-down during normal user loads. Ongoing tuning activities ensured the best optimization. The Platform also exploits features like command query request separation to mitigate against database locking. 
• We helped overcome “rapid-fire change” by empowering application developers to pivot and continuously weather the storm of frequent changes:  The Sagitec Platform's Rules Engine provides the capabilities for high-frequency changes in business rules, validations, and functionality, allowing SWAs to pivot in the matter of hours rather than weeks or months as federal and state governments were requesting frequent changes. 

COVID-19 has affected all businesses and has left millions unemployed across the globe. In the United States, over 57 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits since March 2020. The Federal government and State Workforce Agencies have processed billions of dollars in unemployment so far.  

Times are changing. But change doesn’t have to be chaotic. With the power of Xelence and enterprise systems built with it, you can future proof your organization’s IT for whatever the next crisis or pandemic brings.  Organizations adopting such platforms to power their core application are better equipped to quickly adapt and respond to fast-changing business conditions.