Benefits Automation

The client used a paper-based process to collect open-enrollment and other benefit changes and additions from HR events. The Benefits Department wanted an electronic process. The client was actually licensed for the delivered Benefits Administration module but they were not sure if it would meet their unique requirements. Chris worked with Simone Johnson, a PeopleSoft Benefits Administrator guru to determine if the delivered solution would work and what level of customization would be required. After a thorough requirements gathering phase, it was determined that Chris could deliver a much more usable product as a bolt-on. If the client had gone with the delivered product, the level of customization would have been substantial, and it may still not have met all the client’s requirements.

Chris created an extremely flexible Benefit Automation bolt-on that was highly configurable by the functional staff. Some of the high-level functionality was:

• A set of new setup tables where functional staff could define new events like Open Enrollments, New Hire, Termination and define the behavior of what benefit types the employee would see for an event and what information they were allowed to change.
• A new “event” based system that would automatically trigger new Benefit Automation events from changes in the employee’s records. For example, when a new employee was hired, they would automatically be able to enroll in benefits based on their eligibility, and new Hire events would be automatically created for the employee.
• A set of new self-service pages guided the employee through several different steps that were controlled by setup tables and could be hidden or shown by the functional administrators by event and benefit program.
• Once events were submitted and audited by the Benefits Department, the changes would be automatically updated on the employee’s core benefit tables from the bolt-on staging tables with component interface.
• The employee had access to a consolidated benefits summary page that listed all their benefits and showed a complete history of all their past events and their status.