Thank you, Minister.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The pay administration initiative that you've mentioned, for example, is changing a 40-year-old and largely in-house built pay system and information management system to a commercial off-the-shelf system. It has allowed us to also consolidate the pay services from 57 organizations across the government into one location in Miramichi, which allows us to create 558 jobs in that region. It allows us to decrease the cost of the delivery, and increase the efficiency in the time to deliver the services. It will save, as you indicated, $78.1 million when it is completed. This is not a small initiative, as you can imagine, but it is also one that is on track, and it is driving a fair amount of efficiencies.
On the pension system, which we modernized, that, too, was 40 years old. I don't know, but there's something about those 40-year-old systems. Again, it was modernized and the pension services were consolidated. Those were consolidated in Shediac. That was launched in January 2013. It saves time and effort. It actually allows people to access the services online, which is quite an efficient way of accessing services. We've also been able to remove almost all of the paper from the process. We image all of the documentation. It is entered automatically and is treated, again automatically, from an information-based system.
Because of the success of the transformation, we have also been able to expand the pension platform to incorporate the RCMP system and are moving to incorporate the DND pension system, both of which needed modernization. Rather than having to expend additional funds to modernize those systems separately, we've now been able to leverage the platform we have and draw additional savings and efficiencies as a result.