March 25, 2015
On Thursday, Bluewolf launched a new program called AppealsTrak that was born from the insight and experience gained from a New Jersey project. AppealsTrak, certified by Salesforce, packages an end-to-end solution that can be presented to labor offices faced with similar challenges around the country.
Almost two years ago, when the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development was drowning in a backlog of unemployment appeals, the state agency turned to the cloud.
More specifically, New Jersey chose Salesforce.com as a solution to streamline its appeals process as the Great Recession swelled the number of unemployment benefits cases handled by the office.
At the time, superior case management software was desperately needed. The average time for processing an appeal had shot up to 189 days, and New Jersey was in jeopardy of losing federal funding because the U.S. Department of Labor imposes time-lapse regulations when doling out money to states for unemployment programs.
The New Jersey Labor Department's Chief of Staff Frederick Zavagli had come from the private sector and was familiar with Salesforce. He believed the CRM vendor, better known for managing commercial sales and marketing efforts, offered the right solution.
"He understood, at the core, Salesforce is a platform that can be configured to meet a variety of processes, and very quickly," Dan Osborne, public sector process director at Bluewolf, a solution provider based in San Francisco, told CRN.
Bluewolf responded to an RFP and won the contract to modernize New Jersey's unemployment appeals process.
In New Jersey, the Salesforce-based appeals system took 16 weeks to implement. It automated every step of the appeals process, from intake to case preparation to appearance scheduling, tracking decisions and reporting.
That's a time span that has amazed some government bureaucrats, Osborne told CRN. One Wisconsin official told him she hardly could believe it was possible to craft and implement a solution for an agency of that size in only four months.
What Bluewolf found inside the New Jersey Department of Labor is typical of many state agencies: ballooning rolls, antiquated systems and a massive backlog.
Osborne said he was walking through call centers in New Jersey "looking at black screens with green fonts." The average age of our nation's unemployment compensation systems is 23 years old, he said.
That level of outdated technology suggests tremendous opportunities for solution providers like Bluewolf. What's more, the U.S. Labor Department recently appropriated $5 billion to the states to modernize unemployment processes as they pertain to taxes, benefits and appeals.
Now, more than a year out from Bluewolf's engagement, the New Jersey unemployment office has eliminated its user backlog. The average time lapse in the appeals process has fallen to 30 days, and federal funding is safe.
