New Year. New Technology?
Happy New Year! Your organization might've had a frantic fourth quarter working your way through open enrollment and you may not want to discuss your benefits administration for another few months, but here are two good reasons why you might want to consider implementing new ben admin technology outside of the open enrollment process:
The issues are still fresh in your mind.
The issues you and your staff experienced during open enrollment are recent memories that may help motivate you to do something different. If you wait a few months, the sting of those frustrations may wear off. When fourth quarter rolls around again in 2020, you’ll be stuck with the same experience you had last year and perhaps wishing you had made a change when the “cost” of the change was more bearable.
More relaxed implementation timeline.
When you try to implement a new ben admin solution for open enrollment, it requires stakeholders to understand and work towards a very tight timeline. For example:
October 15ish: Decision makers are presented with renewal plan options for the upcoming plan year
November 10: Make final plan decisions and send information to technology implementation team to the build site and the enrollment system
November 25: Account Managers and HR staff review portal build and enrollment system. Any feedback is taken into consideration and changes are made before the rollout to general population
December 1: Open enrollment starts
December 15: Open enrollment closes
December 16 – 26: Election data is organized, and changes are sent to the carriers
January 1: New plans take effect
If any of the milestones laid out above are missed, there is the potential for the portal build or implementation to be rushed which can lead to mistakes, miscommunications and delays. To maximize the chances of success, all stakeholders must be committed to the timeline and work diligently to meet the project goals. However, when implementing technology outside of open enrollment, you have the luxury of time.
The plan designs and employer contributions have already been established and existing employees’ elections are already with the carriers. This allows the portal and ben admin implementation team to use existing information to build the system. The account management team can also dedicate more time to testing the system before it is delivered to the HR team for review and approval.
More time for training and HR familiarization. The implementation specialists have more time to train the HR users and the HR team has more time to get comfortable with the user interface and functionality before it is introduced to the employees at large. Communication between the HR team and account management team can be confirmed. Notifications are created by the system and sent to the account management team every day. And the system creates transactions to be processed. Implementing a system outside of open enrollment ensures stakeholders have the time to ensure these tools are working correctly.
Benefit Concepts, Inc. offers Gen4 as a no-cost solution to some HR technology and ben admin needs for clients for whom it would be a good fit. We also have relationships and experience with a variety of other HR technology and payroll vendors who can also provide great solutions to their clients. If you are interested in finding out how we can help you with your HR technology search and implementation, please contact your BCI account management team.
Allison Brannan