Understanding the Benefits Administration Process Flow

Running the Benefits Administration process can be complex because the events that you process can follow a variety of different paths. Some employees will have a number of events that require processing, others will have events that don't change their benefits eligibility, and in the case of open enrollment, many employees won't be picked up for event processing at all. In addition, you'll run into situations in which events process erroneously, which means that you'll need to reprocess them until you get the right result.

Remember that Benefits Administration processes events, not participants. At any given time, a participant may be associated with several unprocessed events that are of different event classes on different event dates. During a particular run of the Benefits Administration process, the system uses a set of rules to decide which event to process first and then processes that event from scheduling to finalization before continuing with the next one.

Ideally, you would run the Benefits Administration process two to three times to complete the processing of a participant event:

1. During the first run, the system assigns participant events to a Benefits Administration processing schedule, and scheduled events are, in turn, assigned to a benefit program.

   In addition, Benefits Administration determines benefit program eligibility, options, and defaults, and calculates credits and rates for the participant associated with the event.

2. During the second run, after you've generated enrollment statements for your participants and entered their election choices into the system through the data entry pages, the system validates and loads updated participant plan, dependent, and investment election information.

3. During the final run, Benefits Administration finalizes elections for participants who did not return their enrollment statements and for participants with errors in their records.

   More realistically, errors will occur, resulting from incomplete rule setup, inconsistent HR data, or invalid election entry by the employee. After you review and correct the errors and run the Benefits Administration process again, the system moves the participants who had errors further along in the process.

Each time you run the Benefits Administration process, the participant events you process are assigned a process status designation, so you can determine status and correct errors.