Benefit Concepts, Inc. invested in the Gen4 benefits administration platform in March of 2019. After several months of discussions and training with internal users and clients, we started moving groups on to the system for open enrollments effective June 1st of that year. Since then we have built more than 65 portals for BCI internal and Strategic Partner clients and provided more than 2000 employees with access to their benefit information and the ability to make their elections online.

Several of the groups started out with a Communications Portal which allowed general read-only group access to employee benefits. These platforms give employees the ability to log in and view the benefits they are eligible for without the enrollment component. These are extremely useful platforms because they can act as an intranet site for a company. The platform provides HR users with the ability to independently add and edit content they think their employees would find useful. As is the case with many technology implementations, employee communication portals cut down on the amount of paper that is distributed to employees during open enrollment and throughout the plan year. Even if a group doesn’t use the enrollment functionality, these are still useful resources for groups who choose to use their payroll vendor’s ben admin capabilities or feel more comfortable with more traditional enrollment methods. A broad array of employee communication methods should be considered to give individuals access to information on a variety of platforms and formats.

The “upgrade” from the Employee Communications Portal is the Benefits Administration Portal with the integrated HR Dashboard. The look and feel of the Ben Admin Portal is identical to that of the Employee Communications Portal, which makes the transition almost seamless from an employee’s perspective. One key difference is that instead of having a single log in for an entire benefit class (like with the Employee Communications Portal), each employee will be assigned a unique username (often their work email address) and a password. For groups who transition from an Employee Communications Portal to a Ben Admin Portal, employees don’t need to learn how to use a different user interface. The online enrollment component is easily found on the home page when employees are in a new hire or open enrollment window. Outside of a new hire enrollment or open enrollment period, the systems are identical.

If you have been considering Gen4’s Employee Communications or Ben Admin portals but have been waiting for the right time, that time might be now! We have almost a year of experience with the system and over 2000 employees whose enrollment experiences have been modernized through the platform.

If you’re interested, please reach out to your Benefit Concepts account management team or you can contact me (Allison Brannan) directly at abrannan@mybciteam.com or 713-728-7296.

Allison Brannan