Employee Benefits Enrollment Administrator
The Employee Benefits Enrollment Administrator (EBEA) page must be set up in order for Open Enrollment to work correctly. Here the administrator outlines for each Department and Deduction Policy combination the Start and End Dates for open enrollment. A ’*****’ value is used to indicate a universal policy for either department or deduction policy. For example, if a deduction policy had the same open enrollment for all departments, then the administrator only makes one entry using ’*****’ as the department value. If one department deviates from that date, a separate entry can be made for that department. The look up is done first by date, department, and deduction policy, then by date and department, and lastly just by date until an entry is found. The administrator also uses this page to specify the open enrollment period.
The Employee Benefits Enrollment Administration page is also used to automatically create Email Triggers to send reminder emails when enrollment periods begin and when enrollment deadlines are approaching. This page supports notification of employees at an administrator-specified interval before Open Enrollment begins, one notification during the period, and a last reminder that the period is about to conclude. Each of these notifications can have their own independent Template specified on the page.
Whenever an EBEA entry is saved, an Email Trigger is created for any of the notification dates. The Email Trigger contains the designated Template, a Maturity Date matching the specified notification date on EBEA, and a smart recipient roster that corresponds to the Department / Benefits Policy combination entered on the EBEA entry. The EBEA page stores the ID numbers for these triggers, so that modification of the EBEA entry in the future does not result in duplicate Triggers, but rather results in the modification or deletion of the existing associated Triggers.
Data from EBEA can be downloaded into spreadsheet format by clicking the Download action from the Grid Actions menu. Once downloaded, the data can be updated and uploaded back to EBEA by selecting Upload from the Grid Actions menu. The Download action is available when there is at least one record returned as a result of a browse or search action. When the Download action is selected, all data that was returned as a result of the previous browse or search is selected for download. Once the download is complete the data can be manipulated using the preferred spreadsheet application and can then be uploaded back to EBEA, based on the user’s security setup. If the user can add records to the reference table online they are able to upload records to the table. If additional security is desired, the System Maintenance Utility job that is triggered by the Upload action can be configured with Job Security to restrict the Upload action.
Note: If you plan to use the Download action, data in the fields on this page should not contain any special characters, including return characters. When opening the downloaded file, if special characters are present in the reference page record, that particular record might be, for example, split into two records in the downloaded file, and the extra records would have to be manually deleted/modified.
