The Open Enrollment (OE) business process requires proper setup and configuration of benefits plans, rules and rates. Much of this will already be in place if you are already using the Benefits module; however, there are new forms and new fields in existing forms to support this process.
Open Enrollment periods may be generated for a mass group of employees, for individual employees who have had a life or work event occur, and they may be generated on an ad hoc basis.
Once the Open Enrollment period is generated, employee elections may be done in a single web session or over a period of time in several web sessions. When employees have completed their elections, they must submit all of their elections for approval. Upon submission, the Benefit Administrator is notified by a workflow email that the elections have been done and are awaiting approval.
Following submission, if changes are needed, the Benefit Administrators may send the elections back to the employee with notes. When everything is acceptable, the employee’s Open Enrollment will be approved. Once approved, the employee’s Open Enrollment can be processed manually in IBPOE or in a batch process called UBPOE. Once processed, elections will be turned into enrollments in IBEN effective on the coverage date defined for the Open Enrollment Period or the date derived from the elected coverage’s benefit component rules, which ever is greater. Employees may be notified by workflow when their elections have been approved and processed.
If an employee declines any of their elections, the declined elections will be handled as follows:
- If an employee declines an election they are already enrolled in and the Track Decline toggle is ON for the plan in IBPN, the IBEN enrollment record will be updated with a status of Decline.
- If an employee declines an election they are already enrolled in and the Track Decline toggle is OFF for the plan in IBPN, the IBEN enrollment record will be updated with a status of Decline.
- If an employee declines an election they are not currently enrolled in and the Track Decline toggle is ON for the plan in IBPN, an enrollment record will be created in IBEN with a status of Decline.
- If an employee declines an election they are not currently enrolled in and the Track Decline toggle is OFF for the plan in IBPN, an enrollment record will not be created in IBEN.
- If an employee declines an entire plan election set, the decline is not tracked due to the complicated nature of plan election sets.
On the proper effective date, Payroll will pick up the new enrollments for processing.
The following pages outline the process flow for each type of open enrollment process:
