The Challenge
ABC, a facilities services company, has employed over 16,000 people in fiscal year 2008. At year end, ABC’s payroll vendor generated an enormous number of W2 documents for distribution to each employee. In addition to physically mailing the individual W2 documents, ABC desired this information be delivered through their employee Portal so the information could be
- quickly accessed,
- accessible 24×7 now and into the future, and
- available in an electronic format.
The Solution
ABC provided a single file of all W2’s, a file that exceeded 16,000 pages in length. By intelligently parsing this large file into individual W2s, M&S devised a mechanism to generate a single file per employee based on a unique Social Security Number. Once the files were generated, they were loaded into a database inside the customer’s LAN. A web application was built to identify the user logged into the Extranet Portal, request the appropriate W2, and display it to the user securely over SSL.
The Results
Within weeks, the entire solution was designed, developed, and deployed into production, available to over 16,000 employees. Once deployed, employees immediately began logging into the Extranet Portal from around the US to access their electronic W2s quickly and securely.
Notes
Working with 16,000+ W2 documents is a challenge unique to only the largest employers, however, the need to easily manipulate large and numerous documents as well as exposing data/documents to users over the web securely is a matter almost every organization faces.