Process Trial Open Enrollment

One month before your actual open enrollment, run a trial open enrollment in a test instance to tune performance and validate plan configuration for the upcoming plan year.

At this point, in your production instance, you have:

• Prepared your programs and plans

• Updated your standard and variable rates

• Configured enrollment and rate display

• Configured flexible spending account plans to start new coverage

• Closed in-progress life events

• Finalized and closed action items

• Processed and resolved temporal event participation

Now, you create a separate test instance from this production instance with all or a representative sample of your participants and manage your trial open enrollment.

The trial open enrollment mimics many aspects of the actual open enrollment process, as shown with the following basic high-level tasks:

Task	Work Area	Phase I Trial Open Enrollment	Phase II Actual Open Enrollment
Generate the Participant Enrollment Results report.	Reports and Analytics	Identify test participants.	Compare enrollments before and after open enrollment. Identify any in-progress life events and resolve them before processing open enrollment.
Run the Evaluate Scheduled Event Participation and Enroll in Default Benefits processes.	Evaluation and Reporting	Yes	Yes
Monitor processes and resolve any errors.	Evaluation and Reporting Enrollment	Yes	Yes
Identify and fix performance issues.	Evaluation and Reporting	Yes	Refine as required.
Iteratively, check plan configuration and rates using sample employees and fix errors as required. Back out the open life event. Correct setup. Rerun the open event.	Evaluation and Reporting Enrollment Self-Service Plan Configuration	Yes	Validate on an exception basis.
Enter enrollments.	Self-Service Enrollment	On a test basis	Yes

Identify and Fix Performance Issues

It's difficult to determine the amount of time it takes to process a single person due to the variables that can impact performance. These variables include:

• Complexity in plan configuration

• Hardware

• Network usage

• Optimized table usage

• General database tuning

Poor performance times often result from not running table statistics on a regular basis. In the Evaluation and Reporting work area:

• Check that the threads parameter is set to the number of processors for the computer, at a minimum.

• Check that the chunk size is appropriate to the quantity of rows that processes are writing to the database.

  Use a smaller value when writing many rows, such as when processing participants and converting annual enrollments.

• Analyze and adjust your maximum error threshold as required using the Manage Batch Parameters task.

  Example: If you process your trial open enrollment using your entire participant population, processes might fail because they reached the maximum errors threshold.

• Analyze all index column statistics and gather column, schema, and table statistics before the following processes.

  • Evaluate Scheduled Event Participation

  • Enroll in Default Benefits

  • Close Enrollment