Successfactors Employee Central Global Benefits - new features 1611 and 1608

[Stephanie_Drazd]

Successfactors Employee Central Global Benefits – new features 1611 and 1608

 

The blog explains EC Global Benefits features for the release 1608 and 1611. As part of b1611 we have 3 few features : useful for US companies and the global market.

1. EDI File format to support Carrier Integration: important ask by the US market: the
   Carrier Integration between companies and their health care providers.Background: In the US, ANSI 834 EDI format is the standard format required by companies to exchange health care enrollment details of employees and their dependents with their insurance carriers. With 1611, we are now able to generate files out of EC via SuccessFactors Integration Center. With this it is possible to extract data out of EC in the appropriate format, which is the EDI format (ANSI 834 File Format). The feature is highly flexible to adapt with the large number of specific layouts in the US health care carriers market. In addition to that, it can also be used to extract data as per various other EDI formats available in the market. This is a major step forward to enable an automatic file transfer of employees’ enrollment data to the insurance providers and to accelerate the data transfer from companies to carriers.Below is a sample file output:
   


2. Benefits on behalf handling (Viewing)
   
   What was happening in the past? If admin or manager wanted to view employee benefits, he/she could only do it by proxying as the employee. However, in most organizations, proxying is not a favorable process. We therefore enabled the on behalf handling. The development is split into 2 parts: with 1611, we allow viewing on behalf for all benefits and with a later release, we will focus on enrolling and claiming on behalf. In dependence of the RBP settings, admin or manager will get access to all benefits or no benefits.


3. Benefits Confirmation Statement, improves the employee’s benefits handling by providing him or her a summary of its selected benefits. This was a request coming from countries, i.e. US and Canada, South Africa, where employees are receiving a Benefits Confirmation statement. This statement is a final summary of the employees Benefit selection for a certain validity period which often comprises a full year. The summary shall reflect the elections made during the open enrollment period. Hence the confirmation statement is created once the open enrollment period is closed.

 

Couple of Minor enhancements -

• Rounding off of the coverage amount in insurance is now enabled for more than 2 digits after decimal (as maintained in the object definition) in order to get more precise payroll results. Admin therefore needs to enable the flag 'Use Decimal Precision for Contribution Amounts' for the required benefit and the system will consider the precision maintained in the object definition.


• Workflow messages that appear on the To-Do bar have been enhanced with employee name, in addition to employee ID, benefit name and creation date. Customer can thus easily identify the employee when he/she views the details of a request.

1608 release new features

We invested more addressing technical debts, performance improvement (Performance Improvement of the Auto Enrollment Job for Insurance) and stability of the application.

From a new feature perspective –

1. Introduced rate calculation based on gender. This is needed where insurance providers offer for example health insurances or life insurance plans with insurance rates based on gender. The current insurance rate chart didn’t consider the gender parameter and we therefore added it to the rate chart as an additional parameter next to smoking and age. This parameter can now be taken into account to calculate the correct contribution amounts when creating an insurance plan.


2. Enhancements for benefits of type Pensions/Savings. Why? In US and Canada it is very common that employers are offering saving plans to their employees. Therefore, the admins should be provided the possibility to configure the saving plans according to their needs. The admin has now the possibility to create a plan subtype in dependence of the selected country. According to the country selection, the respective country specific saving plans will be listed. The list has to be maintained by the Benefit Admin. Only a few default values are pre-delivered. It is a cascading list based on the country selected. The new field “plan subtype” is only available when Savings plan is selected in field Plan Type.

More exciting enhancements coming for b1702 and b1705. Watch this space.

Kind regards,

Stephanie

On Behalf of Global Benefits Product Management Team