Many companies offer their employees robust benefit packages with various options that can be tailored to each employee's own needs. These plans require the HR department to keep coverage information in sync with dozens of different healthcare and financial service vendors. A client rolled out an employee self service application that empowered each of its 10,000+ employees to manage their own benefit elections, coverages, and dependent information. Changes to employee information were now made easily and in a timely manner. As the employees were empowered to make their own changes, the HR group became quickly overwhelmed in routing and reconciling the new information from what was effectively the output of 10,000+ data entry clerks to the many benefit vendors.

Rapidly develop and deploy an efficient method of routing employee benefit change information to the appropriate benefit providers and for reconciling the changes with coverage provided, payroll deductions, and the inherent timing and proration issues typically associated with the process.

Alliance Data consultants served as the client's representative to its benefit providers and worked with the client's HR team to establish and adapt methods for electronic transmission of coverage data to and from various healthcare and financial services vendors. ADC also developed a system to automatically manage these transactions and to assist client HR resources in reconciling employee coverage, payroll deductions, and vendor charges for services provided.

The new process and system removed the bottleneck between employee entered changes and the time they were implemented by the benefit vendor. The resulting system also provided a detailed audit trail linking each step in the process from employee, to vendor, to paycheck, and finally to vendor billing. With this information in hand, the client's HR team now has a powerful tool to support inquiries from management, employees, vendors or other interested parties.