Is anyone using an outside vendor’s Benefits Enrollment System for Annual Enrollment

We have used an outside vendor for several years and have imported the data using Add-Ins, BN531 and BN532.  The biggest issue we faced was that people move around, get married, have babies, terminate, etc. after the file was sent to the 3rd party vendor (it was a one time feed for open enrollment).  That means the files that would come back once open enrollment was over needed to be evaluated and audited before they could be uploaded.  For example, an employee has a baby in September and doesn't get the paperwork into benefits before the file goes to the 3rd party vendor in early October. The employee then adds that dependent to the 3rd party site because they don't see them in the file and then the vendor sends the record back as a new dependent for a 1/1 election.  While all that is happening, benefits adds the dependent to Lawson within the first 30 days and enrolls them in the plan.  If you don't carefully audit the files you get back, you could have the same dependent in Lawson twice.  Also, we have employees who re-add dependents that were previously enrolled.  When they use the 3rd party to enroll, that system has no idea the dependent already is in Lawson, just at an inactive status.  The same issue happens with the elections.  Employee is at single coverage when they go thru the 3rd party enrollment process in November.  Then after the enrollment period closes, the spouse no longer has coverage and the employee makes a life event election for 2 person coverage.  When the record comes back from the 3rd party, it will only be for single coverage because that was the situation when the employee went thru enrollment in November.  I'm hoping your 3rd party will get a daily/weekly feed from Lawson so that the 3rd party enrollment system stays as up-to-date as possible!!!!  The morale of the story is AUDIT, AUDIT, AUDIT!!!!  I cannot tell you how many hours and long nights it takes to look at what we got back from the vendor before we could even consider loading the files into Lawson.  

As a side note, we decided to stop using an outside, 3rd party vendor and move to Lawson's employee self-service for benefits enrollment.  Because Lawson's delivered self-service enrollment product falls short of what we needed, we purchased an add-on application from Intellias that works with Lawson's product and fills in the gaps.  We're doing that implementation now and will go live with new hires shortly.  This fall will be our first Lawson open enrollment.... 

We have used a 3rd party vendor for several years, but we do not add the benefit enrollment information to any of the BN screens. The vendor only sends payroll information (benefit deductions and pay codes for Group Term Life and Vacation Sell). The actual enrollment and dependent information is stored only in the Vendor's system; the employees enroll and make life event changes on the vendor's site and our benefits department employees are able to research, report and manage manual changes on the vendor's site. That way we don't have to worry about keeping the 2 systems in sync. We get a weekly feed from the vendor and the deductions and pay codes are loaded using the PR521 and PR514.

We have used a 3rd party vendor for several years. Prior to this year I used AddIns to upload the vendors feed to either BN32,3 or PR14 as appropriate. Some of our benefits (Medical,Dental, Vision, Life insurance products) are defined as "benefits" (use BN32) while others are entered directly as a deduction code (use PR14). This year we are going to continuous enrollment due to Life Events (qualified status changes) so I developed a set of Process Flows to run BN32.3 or PR14.1 transactions.

The biggest issue I have encountered is due to the definition of some of our benefits (the ones handled through BN32). Not all of these true benefits have a "Waive" option so I need to issue a Stop action through BN32.1 for any withdrawl/termination of the benefit, but I cannot determine exactly which line number to Stop (this has been discussed elsewhere) so these are handled manually by our internal benefits manager. These particular benefits cannot be handled through BN32.3 since there is no default defined in our system. There were underlying business needs behind this configuration.

The 3rd party vendor is the true record of source for benefits, feeding all changes to us which are then loaded into Lawson. Some of the Life Insurance/Disability products require Evidence of Insurability so we have a process where the person "enrolls" in the benefit through the 3rd party vendor, the 3rd party vendor flags the enrollment as pending and notifies the carrier of the employees request but does not send us the pending enrollment, the insurance carrier notifies our benefits manager of approval or denial, she then goes into the 3rd party vendor system and flags the record as approved or denied as appropriate, the 3rd party vendor then sends the change record to us on a weekly feed, the vendor feed is then processed and the appropriate BN32 and PR14 transactions are performed.

As part of this process we send the 3rd party vendor a weekly demographic feed, generated with a process flow, containing new hires, newly benefit eligible employees and terminations/retirements so they know to allow or deny access to these employees.

AngieP - Our company just contracted with Intellias for open enrollment - how did yours go and are you still using them?

Hi Mary,

We contracted with Intellias for our open enrollment that was in May this year. We were very happy with the success of our OE, but the implementation had some frustrations. They have several modules that can be purchased, so knowing what you want in advance will be helpful. I'd be happy to chat with you in more detail if desired.