This week I had he chance to attend a webinar from Workday centered on the annual Benefits Enrollment process. It was an excellent session, that showcased Workday's cool user interface, intuitive design, and powerful features. Let's just say I left the webinar with an extreme case of 'system envy'.
For the last few years myself and a colleague in HR have been responsible for ensuring the smooth running of our organization's annual Open Enrollment, which has been done entirely online for four or five years. In fact, online or web-enabled benefits enrollment is not that novel a concept any more. If you went to an organization that was still passing out paper enrollment forms, you would probably be surprised.
But Workday takes the process a major step further, with their concept of the 'Workday Benefits Network'. Essentially, Workday will (for a fee) take over the responsibility of creating the interfaces from your HR system, to the benefits providers for the purposes of enrolling employees in plans and recording changes. I can't begin to describe how much time, effort and cost we have endured in developing and maintaining (on our own) the necessary file feeds from our HR system to our various providers. It is an annual exercise it seems, us tweaking and modifying our custom code to meet the providers new or changed formats, waiting to hear back from their tech staffs, and us making still more modifications.
Frankly, it is a low-value, behind the scenes activity that is important, but invisible to our employees and managers.
I would love for our ERP provider to take ownership of all of those processes, but I doubt that would ever happen.
Can we switch to Workday now?