We have been TOLD that we need to do open enrollment electronically this year. We thought about employee self-serve, but we do not have enough licenses to issue for each employee. We have a few hurdles as well.

1. Most employees do not have access to a computer at home or at work

2. Our approval for kiosks has been pushed to 2007

We are trying to find alternate areas of the hospital where employees can have access to a computer for benefit enrollment purposes.

Does anyone have recommendations for electronic enrollment outside of Lawson that 'should be' easy to convert? What are the pros and cons of the vendor or software you used? We need something that is extremely user friendly, as we do not have a benefit specialist on hand for all shifts.

Any input is appreciated!!!

From our research, going with Lawson's employee self-service is best solution. Mainly because if you go with a 3rd party you have to setup the benefit information in the 3rd party application and you have to figure out how to get the information back into Lawson. These two major steps are avoided with Employee self-service. We ran into the same issue you did which is cost. Employee self-service definitely is not cheap to get the licenses for all the employees. You can help justify the cost though if you focus on the top two issues, as well as that employees can update phone/address themselves, view their check stubs, enroll in training (if you use the Lawson training module).

For the enrollment process, we have used a training room with computers in them for enrollment which is good the first time just so you have someone in the training center who can assist. There are a lot of options though and it depends on the number of employees you need enrolled and the number of locations your employees are at. If you have a strong IT infrastructure, you could even roll-out employee self-service to be accessed remotely which means employees could get to it from home, the library, or any public computer, as well as any internal computers or kiosks you set up.

I thouhght this issue came up before with licensing. Now I might be wrong but if you tie all the employees to the same LAUA record then do you really need a separate license for each one of them?

I believe cddotdot is correct......

Tie all your RD30 records back to one named laua user and you should be good to go.

In my former life working for a client, we used Aon to outsource open enrollment. They produced Benefit letters, provided IVR enrollment, and sent back files in the format required. I think they are pricey but my experience with them was great. Their team quickly responded to any issues that we had. In all, a good experience.

I also agree with cddotdot, tie them all to one LAUA user (that's the we we are setup).

A note of caution: If you have not used Lawson's Employee Self Service (ESS), it NEEDS LOTS of CUSTOMIZATIONS to meet most users needs :banghead: . Out of the box it was practically useless for us (and most others according to the consultants we had helping us with out nitial implementation).

On the plus side (depending on your point of view) all of the ESS screens are a combo of HTML and javascript.

Also, since IOS, Portal, ESS, RSS and ENV are all tied to the same versions when you upgrade one - you have to upgrade all. That means putting back in all your custom modifications (and checking that Lawson has not put in the same mod you did).

Not trying to scare you, just want you to be aware of what's potentially involved.

cheers,
dgreen

We are in the middle of performing a Gap Analysis of the Lawson OE functionality. We have used AON in the past and have been extremely pleased. Since we own ESS we are giving Lawson a look. At this point, it looks like we will have to perform numerous customizations.

Thank you all for your advice. We are definitely going to look into employee self-serve as an option, especially after receiving some quotes from outside vendors!

We have a new director over our IT dept who cleaned house and brought in a lot of fresh faces, so we'll see if they're up to the challange if that's the route we go.

I will take all of your comments with me to our next meeting.

Thanks again!

Unfortunately, the licensing for ESS is based on number of RD30 records - not on LAUA records, so tieing everyone to one LAUA record doesn't get you past the licensing issue. You will indeed need a license for every active employee.

Considering Aon, we're actually going the OTHER way -- we're leaving Aon and going employee self-service. Even with the purchase of ESS licenses for 4,700 employees, we're still saving money.

And as someone mentioned, you still get the benefit of giving employees access to their leave balances, pay stubs, etc. Market it as an investment in employee satisfaction and retention.

the hospital where I previous worked set up a "cyber cafe" next to the cafeteria. It was just a small room with "clamshell" systems (flat panel display mounted to wall, hinged panel that pulls down creating a "desk" surface, with keyboard and mouse.) The actual computers behind the wall were rescued from the scrap-heap (old computers that had since been replaced with newer models), since you don't need a lot of processing power to simply run a browser.

Employees could use the computers in the cyber cafe for anything they wanted, provided it didn't violate a relaxed set of acceptable use policies. Most of the people I saw using the cyber cafe were listening to music, playing online games, instant messaging their friends or accessing their Hotmail accounts. It was a nice place to kick back, relax and have a little fun.

But during open enrollment, the cyber cafe was restricted to benefits enrollment only and staffed with at least one HR and one IS employee at all times.

Again, the expense was considered as an investment into employee satisfaction and retention. And the positive feedback from the employees was overwhelming.

we used a 3rd party last year for open enrollment and I sent them the BN531 file layout....we are STILL cleaning up that mess. I would rather use paper and manually key rather than go through that mess.

We are just 3 weeks away from performing a mandatory open enrollment of all benefit eligible employees (2300). This is our second Open Enrollment using Lawson Portal so I thought I would share what we have learned thus far. Basically, if you are providing your various insurance carriers and flex spending carriers with a file to their spec from the Lawson enrollment, you really need to have a Lawson Programmer onboard or outsourced. We also learned that our carriers want a full enrollment which requires that every employee go thru the process...otherwise there is not data in the file for them!!

Also, we use the canned version of ESS, with the exception of a javascript that generates an HRBenefits email to HR and the employee each time they change something during the month of enrollment.

In the past, we have used third party people to come in and do our open enrollment...which is a "free service" however, by the time they created the needed BN531 for Employee and Dependents plus pushed thier insurance products on our employees, we had a mess of inaccurate data brought back into our system.

Live and learn and we are :)