New program speeds up employee enrollment

Employers with multiple bases of operation often experience a strain on benefit administrators when enrolling employees into their health insurance, 401(k) and other voluntary services. Recently, PlanSource released its latest update to its platform, Copernicus, to address this challenge. Benefit managers such as Lisa Degisi, benefits and wellness specialist at California accounting and consulting firm Burr Pilger Mayer, are calling it a “godsend.”

The Copernicus benefits onboarding platform builds on PlanSource’s mobile accessible employee experience capabilities. It allows a company’s HR team members to access documents that are not related to specific benefit plans, send messages to prompt new hires to respond when forms are required, organize documents associated with dependents and initiates automatic approval of benefits to prevent potential delay in coverage.

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Ryan Baldwin, chief technology officer at PlanSource, says one aim of the Copernicus program is to give HR teams new tools and ways to improve efficiency. He cites the new documentation management feature that allows speeds up the benefits documentation processing. “We’re always looking for ways to automate complex administrative process for our customers,” Baldwin says.

The new documentation tools allow employees to upload required benefits documents directly from a mobile phone or other device. In addition, HR teams can also request documents from employees or new hires that are not related to a specific benefit or plan, giving them greater flexibility in how they process forms.

Modern interface
As the only benefits and wellness specialist for BPM’s seven offices, two of which are based outside of the U.S., Degisi says having this program that can be accessed through computer or mobile portals helps her streamline the enrollment process without having to individually meet with every employee. “The interface is really modern and easy to use and to navigate,” Degisi says. “For me, the whole reporting side is just incredible.”

Degisi is able to see the employees who are enrolled, those who still require certain documents to be filled out, and where employees currently stand in the enrollment process. The program also creates reports based on census data, dependent and age-related data so she can report this information to her executive superiors.

“I came from a company where [the enrollment process] was all manual and we had about 350 employees enrolled in benefits and it was just a nightmare to go through all that paperwork,” Degisi says.

Also see: Moving the meter on benefits utilization.”

Degisi says she would recommend this product to anyone who manages benefits within their company, and also says paying monthly bills for benefits can be just as time-consuming for an administrator as signing employees up for benefits, which is why she also highly recommends the bill reconciliation component.

“It helps manage the administrative part of benefits, so whoever is in charge of that department can really focus on things like searching for additional benefits or providing benefits training,” she says.

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