The NSW Department of Education mails out cheques for more than one million school children each year.
Since 1998, the NSW Department of Education and Training has offered a financial assistance program to help meet the expenses associated with sending children back to school. Parents are entitled to receive $50 for each child. More than one million school children within NSW are dispersed over 3,000 government, private and home schools, so the assembly of a complete list of names and addresses is a significant undertaking. Accuracy and security of information are paramount and personalised cheques need to be printed and distributed within a very tight timeframe.
To access the necessary information, the Department in consultation with us has developed a Data Collection Kit containing procedures and forms that each school must complete. Most responses are received electronically, others in paper form. We manually data enter all hardcopy information and feeds electronic responses into a centralised database, which is then provided to the Department and a call centre so that parent/guardian inquiries can be handled effectively. Software has also been developed to ensure data integrity and information is sorted and validated so that children from the same family can be automatically grouped together. This allows one cheque to be distributed per family, reducing print volumes by around 200,000 cheques and dramatically saving production time and costs.
"HPA (now Salmat) has the expertise and resources to process responses from thousands of schools and to create and maintain a substantial database, which can then be integrated with a technology based printing and distribution process. It is a pleasure to work with HPA (now Salmat), as they respond quickly to urgent matters and are focused in getting the job done as quickly and smoothly as possible."
Dennis Clancy, Director of School and College Financial Support, NSW Department of Education and Training
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