Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Hackett Group focuses on it's a best practice world, best practice organization, and we felt we needed to bring them in to get us that extra step and to make sure that our processes, people and systems are the best that they can be, and that we are providing the same kind of top quality service that you should be able to expect from a human resource organization.
The process is incredibly intensive. We spent the first two weeks completing questionnaires in 12 different areas of human resources. Just to give you an example, one of the questionnaires was 80 pages long and one answer to one question on the 80 pages required a 12-page table to respond. So they have a huge team in different locations all across Canada and the U.S. who are now analyzing that data.
Then they sent people on site. We have four gentlemen here. They've been in Yellowknife, Hay River, Inuvik, Simpson and Fort Smith, and they're doing half-day workshops on all of the different areas of human resource practice with our staff. They start with current state. So they examine right down to how every piece of paper moves and how every transaction happens and how we're doing it now. That took two weeks.
Then they move into a best practices comparison to your current practice. Then we go into a final stage, which they call future state, which is where can we go, what do we need to do to get with our people, our processes and our systems to the kind of work that we need.
We were dealing with a tremendous backlog. We were dealing with systems that we knew didn't work and we had ideas about what we thought needed to be done, but we thought it was appropriate to bring in people who this is what they do. They are experts in the field. They are experts in payroll, in all areas of benefits administration, and they can bring that resource to support us, to help us make sure that the moves and the changes we make are the right ones to serve our clients. So that's all the work that they're doing. We will have the report in early April.