Published: Sep 24, 2024

Advancing economic equity with enhanced progressive wage portal

NCS collaborated with the Manpower Research and Statistics Department (MRSD) and Information Systems and Technology Department (ISTD) from Ministry of Manpower (MOM) to implement a Progressive Workforce solution, anchored by the Labour Statistics Survey Portal (LSSP). The Occupational Employment Dataset and Progressive Wage Portal were developed to expand and enhance LSSP’s labour management capabilities. Adhering to stringent Government IM8 policy standards, NCS executed the full spectrum of activities, such as migrating data from legacy systems, establishing a new data repository, and commissioning a new portal to automate compliance checks and compensation benchmarks. The new and improved solution has equipped MOM with improved accessibility, efficiency, and data management capabilities, empowering both employers and employees. Additionally, it helps to facilitate more informed decision making and effective policy formulation.

MRSD recognised the need to improve labour data management to ensure data-driven decision making and aid swift policy interventions, which requires addressing several challenges. This includes streamlining cumbersome manual data collection processes, establishing a centralised database to consolidate comprehensive employment data, improving compliance and regulatory monitoring to effectively implement the Progressive Wage Model, and expanding access to critical labour statistics and benchmarks. Addressing these issues were crucial for MOM to foster informed decision-making, enhance transparency, and ensure the efficacy of labour policies aimed at supporting Singapore's workforce and economic development. 

To address these issues, MRSD implemented LSSP which aims to streamline data collection, simplify compliance oversight, and enhance data quality and accessibility. 

The launch of LSSP represented a significant milestone in MRSD's commitment to leveraging technology for data-driven decision making and strategic workforce planning. The LSSP was created to modernise labour data management and policy implementation, paving the way for a data-driven approach to tackle today's labour challenges. Beyond enhancing survey creation capabilities, LSSP enables users to manage the entire survey lifecycle—from designing surveys and uploading sample data, to administrating and overseeing survey operations, to managing survey closure and downloading datasets. Government agencies and industry stakeholders benefit from LSSP's seamless integration, efficient data collection processes, and robust analytical capabilities, empowering them with actionable insights derived from reliable national labour market statistics.

In response to the dynamic needs of Singapore's evolving labour market, MRSD embarked on several initiatives to further enrich LSSP’s functionality. Building on LSSP's foundations, two enhancements were introduced. Firstly, the Occupational Employment Dataset was established as a mandated registry to collect comprehensive data on current workers' occupational profiles and employment statuses. Secondly, the Progressive Wage Portal was implemented to allow employees to check if their employers are paying them fairly, based on the Progressive Wage Model and Local Qualifying Salary requirements. These two expansive upgrades enabled more informed policy decision making by providing insights into workforce demographics and career progression pathways.

Together, these components form a comprehensive ecosystem with critical tools and insights to aid MOM in understanding the complexities of the labour market. Solution highlights include:

• Designed Integrated Survey Management System software architecture by leveraging on Pega’s Case Management module and Survey framework, ensuring that it remains compliant with the Singapore Government’s IT security policy, with clear segregation of internet facing and intranet facing functionalities.
• Developed capabilities for comprehensive survey lifecycle management, addressing the holistic needs of managing survey takers, interviewers, and the entire survey response workflow, from the point of survey taking to the completion of the validation of survey responses.
• Provided >40 templates for new database structure to facilitate mapping of data field from existing applications to the template format.
• Migrated more than 100 mil records from Bespoke data model (MsSQL) to Pega proprietary data model.
• Implemented multiple modes of data submission including web-based (Internet - self-service / Intranet - assisted by interview agents), file-based, and API-based interfaces.
• Integrated with other Government agencies and other MOM systems’ data for Local Qualifying Salary assessment.
• Introduced the Occupational Employment Dataset to collect detailed geospatial data covering workers' occupational profiles, workplaces, and employment statuses.
• Rolled out the Progressive Wage Portal to enable employees to verify fair wages based on the Progressive Wage Model and Local Qualifying Salary requirements.

The joint implementation of the Progressive Workforce solution by MRSD and NCS, anchored by LSSP, has notably advanced MOM’s capabilities to manage labour data more effectively, ensure compliance with regulatory standards, formulate data-driven policies, and enhance transparency and accessibility for both employers and employees. This comprehensive approach has streamlined labour data management, strengthened compliance with the Progressive Wage Model, and enabled more informed policymaking, ultimately leading to a more efficient and transparent system.

Key impacts include:

• Empowered survey designers without IT knowledge to design complex surveys (up to 2000 questionnaires) by leveraging on Pega’s highly intuitive and visual designer studio that provides drag & drop capabilities for most of the features offered by the platform.
• Supported ~40-50 survey to be published annually and managed 1 million survey submissions through streamlining and automating the entire survey life cycle.
• Improved ease of maintenance and reusability with Pega's “Situation Layer Cake” architecture, allowing for the development of common functionalities for web and mobile to be built once and deployed across multiple channels, while accommodating channel-specific requirements
• Reduced technical overhead with approximately less than 30% of the entire solution requiring customisation since out-of-the-box Pega configurations can be used instead of coding from scratch.
• Multi-channel and seamless updating of the Occupation Employment Dataset registry to facilitate the ease of submission by companies.
• Optimising administrative resources and pre-populating survey responses to minimise respondent burden and enabling data collection for longitudinal surveys.
• Improved management of labour data by establishing centralised database that securely stores and manages comprehensive occupational and employment data of workers in Singapore from registered businesses.
• Accelerated delivery of reliable national labour market statistics for making informed decision-making
• Enhanced compliance monitoring (i.e. performing Progressive Wage Mark eligibility checks) for officers through strengthened oversight of survey data submissions from firms, integrated criteria and verification processes, and simplified procedures for obtaining and maintaining such accreditations.
• Enhanced transparency and accessibility by providing employees with tools to verify fair wages and confirm adherence to the Progressive Wage Model and Local Qualifying Salary
• Automated regulatory compliance for firms and employees, with tools designed to track adherence to the Progressive Wage Model and Local Qualifying Salary, enabling the verification of fair wages and access to information easily.