Paul Gathard at

ConAgra Foods, Inc.

ConAgra Foods, Inc., Internal Project Manager & Pension Functional Lead – Served as Internal Project Manager to coordinate the effort between internal ConAgra employee resources and the Mercer Human Resource Consulting firm configuring the Pension Administration system.

As the Pension Functional Lead, conducted unit, system, user acceptance and regression testing of all Mercer configured parameters. As a former Mercer hired independent consultant, Mr. Gathard had intricate knowledge of Mercer process and procedure and all Mercer project staff members. One of Mr. Gathard’s primary tasks was to hold Mercer accountable for all project deliverables and project tasks.

Supervised the implementation and testing of all customizations, interfaces, reports and forms and letters used in daily retiree processing. Mr. Gathard validated all data conversion efforts including the massive effort to consolidate all retiree data from multiple data sources.

During the course of the implementation of 145 pension plans mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures required Mr. Gathard to also take on the concurrent business needs to adapt the configured system to meet those needs including building new plans, adding blocks of union employees to existing plans and the plan termination payments to thousands of terminated employees due to divestiture. New regulations required Relative Value calculations be completed and incorporated into the calculation systems and forms. Mr. Gathard performed extensive data extract routines to support actuarial valuations and all year-end activities.

Size and Scope – This project involved the configuration of 144 defined benefit pension plans and one frozen defined contribution plan for 90,000 active employees and the retirement administration of 245,000 retirees, beneficiaries and alternate payees. All payroll and accounting integrations were supervised and tested by Mr. Gathard at every connecting point including trustee reconciliation and all audit routines.