Mark Tomsheck

I am the founder of PSPA Tech, and I want to share the story of my evolution with PeopleSoft Pension Administration.

Growing up in a family business, I learned how to wow customers daily. I honed my friendly, informative interactions to help customers solve problems and reach their goals. I put in the hard work behind-the-scenes to deliver an outstanding product and customer experience.

Between games of Olympic Decathlon, I directed my Apple 5+1/4 inch floppies at programming Basic and Assembler games and publishing newsletters.

I earned my Actuarial Science degree at Purdue University, graduating with a handful of passed exams.

As an intern at a Pension Actuarial firm, I got my introduction to actuarial valuation data processing and programming for benefit calculation systems using magnetic tape and the amazing APL (A Programming Language), where an entire program might be confused for hieroglyphics from Tut’s tomb.

Next, I had a role as a business analyst and facilitator for the implementation of custom systems on a midrange platform. Here I learned that even with increasingly powerful case development tools, creating new systems from scratch that can automate pension administration workflows is no easy task.

This is when I discovered commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) pension administration applications and was assigned to help PeopleSoft test the 7.5 release of PSPA. It was fun to try and break things for a change and then program our robots to keep trying to break things.

Off to Big Bank to hone PSPA configuration skills, devise clever workarounds, and practice reporting issues to PeopleSoft. Maybe COTS wasn’t a perfect solution after all. Well, my debugging skills came up to speed quickly, and it was time to dive into COBOL head first.

At about this time, I co-founded PensionSmart. I took an assignment at PeopleSoft to fix some of the bugs I reported. I also build a robust set of implementation utilities to make it easier for implementers of all experience levels to manage and validate configuration objects.

Off to Big Pharma for more significant challenges integrating two customized PSPA implementations, providing extended periods of support, enormous data cleanup project, rapid scaling of the process for a massive reduction in force initiative, and finally transitioning to an outsourcer. So much professional growth in this period.

Off to Big Airline for a fast-paced implementation of four plans.

Off to Big Conglomerate to develop and facilitate a training program for PSPA implementers and developers.

At this point, PSPA was entering a new era. Corporate clients were winding down their projects, and late-adopter Public Sector clients came on the scene. These projects’ complexity, diverse rules, significant functionality gaps, and extensive integration ambitions dwarfed prior ‘big bang’ projects.