Benefits Administration

We have configured the required set ups for Benefit management, however the bigger task in hand is to administer the benefits. Usually the Benefits Administration is done by the HR team with a team of dedicated members. The task in hand is to educate them about the system, again providing them expertise to maintain the system. In this section, we will be going through the most widely used set of transactions and learn about various steps involved with them.

Basic Forms

Let's go through the important forms and functions that are used in Benefits Administration. The most important and basic form is the "Benefits Service Center". This form holds the basic view only details of the Person's benefit. The details like:

Important Person and Assignment Data like, National Identifier, Employee Number, Business Group, Location, Organization, and People form DFF etc.
Address
Life Event Summary: Details on the Past, Current and Future Life Events with status.
Person types of the Person
Benefit Summary, indicating the different Compensation Objects and Person's eligibility/ enrolment in those.
A Details button to tell more about the Hire Dates, Term Dates/ reasons and Leave of Absences.
Two indicators telling about the Potential Life Events / Action items.

So, at a glance of this form, one can have a complete understanding of the person's current status, his enrolments and Life Events in place; however all these data are just “view only”. Let's go to other forms that can be used for updating details. Let's go through the Forms once.

All these screens might not be useful for our benefit administrators; however a lot of them will. So Oracle gives us a handle, through which we can keep the important forms handy. In "Benefits Service Centre", we can add links to these screens and then use the Service Centre as a one stop solution screen. We can access these screens from the Desktop Activities button on the Benefit Service centre. To do so, we can navigate to Online Activity Screen and add the required forms there. See Figure 6.48 – Service centre.

Responsibility: HRMS Manager

Navigation: Total Compensation -> General Definitions -> Authentication Activities.

(Figure 6.48 – Service centre)

Steps: We can add in the sequences and then add the Function Names from the List of Values. The User Function Name is free text. The Best practice is to add a number suffix to the User Function Name. That helps us use the number as a hot key for that function.

Now, let's go to details, we will go and discuss the various processes one by one.

Triggering a Life Event

We are aware of the fact that, a Life event is triggered either through a Data Change or a Derived Factor. Here Data can be of any type, Personal, Employment, and Enrolment. So let's imagine a Person has a data change, for example, Address Change; what exactly happens after that is the discussion point here.

As soon as the data changes, the system looks for any Person changes/ Related Person Changes that are attached to the address fields, If a Person changes in found, it is evaluated.
If the Person change/ Related Person Change returns a Yes; system tries to find the attached Life Event and adds it to the potential Life events of the Person on which the change has occurred, considering the "Occurred Date Determination" Field on Life Event Reasons screen.
Now, if we open the Person Life Events screen, we will see the life event inserted on the "Potential Life Event" tab, with an Occurred date added there and a status as Detected.
The notified date tells us the date on which the data change was notified (the actual system date, not the session/ date tracked date).
So all these happen automatically without any Manual Intervention.

Now, as we have the Life Event triggered, let's see how the Processing takes place.

Processing a Life Event

Once the Life Event is triggered, the next task on hand is to process it. Once the system goes live, the Processing of life events becomes automatic, with a Concurrent request called "Participation Process: Life Event". This event can be scheduled to run every night, so that it can pick the detected and Unprocessed Life Events and process them, if the Occurred date is < = the system date.

However, if we want to do it manually, then how would we do it? Here are the steps:

The Potential event is present and the Occurred date < = the session/date track date.
Now, go and click on Process Life Events form.
The system then goes and checks if more than one Life events are triggered as of the same date, if none found, it goes to the next step, however if more than one life events found, the system tries to resolve the conflict by looking at the Override status, if one of them is found superior, it becomes the winner Life events, and all others are voided. If the conflict is not resolved by the override status, the system then looks for logic in the Collapse Life Events screen. If a record found to give a resultant on the triggered Life Events, the winner is decided, and all others are voided. If there is still no resolvability, then the system makes all the competitive Life Events Manual, and needs a user intervention to declare the winner, as the system failed to do so.
If the winner life event is decided, then the valuation Rule attached to the same is fired. The Evaluation rule might just change the occurred date or might even insert another Life event in that place, voiding the former one. If there is no Evaluation Rule, the system just continues with the Life Event.
The next task it does is looking at the "Causes Related Person Life Event". If there are any records found, the system goes and inserts the related life event to all the dependents of the Person.
Then the system looks at the Person's life event history and figures out, if there is any life event that should be backed out because this life event is being run in the date prior to the occurred date of the former. If any such Life events are found, they are backed out.
Finally, it should open up a summary page telling about the resultants of all the actions just happened right now. It will tell us the winner event name, the related Person and the triggered life events and also the backed out Life events.
The system will expect a nod from us; to do the same we can just press "Commit and Proceed".
Then the BENMNGLE does its job of evaluating eligibility, Electability, defaults, Coverage, rates, Premium and Required Certifications.
If there is enrolment Opportunities and a valid window present, then the Life Event goes to Started state, else the Life event is termed as Processed.
It then looks for communication Types to see, if there is any Communication to be sent.
Finally a summary page opens with the Enrolment window dates, automatic Benefits listings and details of Dropped / Modified Comp Objects if any. Another tab holds all the triggered communication types.
We might need to process some communication extracts in order to send the Pre-Enrolment Literatures out to the participants.

Saving Elections

Now, once the Life event is started and the enrolment period is open, we can go and make election for the Participant. In an ideal case, the triggering and processing of life events should happen automatically by data change and concurrent programs respectively. Once the LE is in started state, the Person should get a communication, and he should log in to the SSHR- Benefits application to make his elections; which we will be discussing in details later in this chapter. However at present we are looking in to the forms application, where a Benefits Administrator can go and make elections on behalf of a Person. Let's go through the steps.

Once the LE is in started state.
Go to the Benefits Service centre for the Person.
To check the Electability, Defaults, Rates, Certifications and enrolment window, we can go to "Person Life Events" Screen, and click on "Enrolment Opportunity" button, highlighting the Life Event in Concern.
The Electable choice button then leads us to the Choices and rates in the highlighted Program; and the enrolment period is right at the bottom of the screen.
Now, time to make elections. Make sure the current date falls between the Enrolment windows; if needed, we can date track.
Go to Benefits elections screen, and we will be able to see all the Default choices there, Grouped by Plan types, Sorted on sequences.
Now, if we click on any one of the rows, a LOV opens with all the electable choices in that Plan type along with the benefit amount, rates (Communicated and Defined), Certification etc.
We can make a choice out of the Electable choices and repeat the same for all plan types. Once done, the elections can be saved.
Then we can click on the Designee button to validate existing designee and designate new dependents. The Designate Dependents screen shows only eligible dependent in the list, based on designation level, most preferable PTIP level.
Once the Elections are made, then the Life Event can be closed manually, from the "Person Life Events" Screen.
To manage the Life Event Closures manually, we can schedule the "Close Enrolments Process" to close the Life Event windows. The code that determines when to close the enrolment is based on the code we use in the Timing Screen of "Program Enrolment Requirement".

Validating Enrolments & Communications

Once the elections are saved, a participant's election can be seen in "Enrolment Results" Screen. See Figure 6.49 – Enrolment Results. Here the Enrolments are listed in the order of Plan types with details like:

(Figure 6.49 – Enrolment Results)

Now, let's go see the communications triggered on the Person. To do so, we will have to go to "Person Communications" screen on the Benefits service centre. See Figure 6.50 – Person Communications. Here the Communication types are listed with the following details:

(Figure 6.50 – Person Communications)

Using SSHR for Benefits

SSHR or Self Service Human Resource is an interface for the Participants to manage their HR related data online. SSHR can be used to perform a lot of tasks, for products ranging from Payroll to Time and Labor. We will talk about the Benefits system now.

The Personal and Employment related data can be viewed and updated by the Person by SSHR, so if anything is changing here, or by the HR department, the triggering of life event is taken care of. Again the Benefits link enables the Participants to add/ remove Contacts online.

Responsibility: Employee Self-Service

Navigation: Benefits

Once we click on the Benefits link, the "Dependents and Beneficiary" page opens.
The Add/Remove of Contacts can be done here.
Once Next is hit, the Participant sees the existing Benefits, and if the date falls between any Enrolment window, the Participant gets a chance to update his/her benefits.

The SSHR is an easy to use, user friendly interface provided to the Employees, Ex-Employees and contacts to add and maintain their personal and professional details, and Benefits as an application is part of it.