Managing Open Enrollment for 60,000 Employees Across 36 Union Groups

A Fortune 500 energy company had an extremely complex health and welfare structure covering 60,000 individuals, 36 union groups and countless grandfathered benefits. An extremely thin benefits staff did not have the time required to effectively manage the annual open enrollment process and generally did not possess the skill set needed to manage the significant data required for open enrollment.

SBA received data files from the client’s eligibility vendor and performed data cleanup on a monthly basis to ensure quality data for 300 eligibility groups across 250 separate plans. SBA led the effort to write specifications for the eligibility vendor to capture all necessary plan changes, then managed the vendor through development, built robust test cases and thoroughly tested hundreds of scenarios. Following open enrollment, SBA fully validated the eligibility vendor’s payroll and carrier files to ensure they were completely correct.

SBA’s role in data management and execution of the entire open enrollment process with the eligibility vendor ensured that open enrollment was efficient and effective. SBA has continued to support the client’s open enrollment on an annual basis, as without SBA, the thinly staffed benefits group would not be able to execute all of the necessary tasks required for this highly complex situation and would therefore experience significant errors and low participant satisfaction.