Open Enrollment is just around the corner and with our final product release of the year, you will find some exciting new features and enhancements that will set your OE season up for success.

Included in this release, you will find:

• Benefits on the go with The Source
• Increased engagement, retention and benefits utilization
• Open enrollment readiness solutions
• Enhanced ecosystem integrations 

We know this is the time for benefits planning to shine, so we’re setting you up for success like a fresh planner sets the tone for a new school year. Read on to check out some highlights of the Celadon Release.

While employers continue to invest millions in benefits, employees only spend about 15 minutes a year making their selections. Additionally, 80% of companies say employees don’t read their benefits material and if they DO read it, half of them don’t understand it.

Increase your employee engagement this year by putting company news, initiatives and benefits information in the palm of their hands 24/7/365 with The Source. This one stop shop allows employees to enroll in benefits, receive company communications, find a provider, view plan usage, view ID cards and more all within a mobile command center on their smartphone. From accessing important company links and push notifications to utilizing benefits such as telemedicine, employee engagement is more accessible than ever.

As part of the continuing development of DecisionIQ, our decision support tool to make enrolling easier and more intuitive, employees will also now see Voluntary Life contribution recommendations when they go to enroll. Based on employee data already stored in the system, 100% of employees will automatically see a suggested contribution with no additional effort on their part. This paired with the automatic medical, dental, and vision recommendations clears out the confusion and makes enrolling in the right plans a breeze. When employees enroll in the right plans everyone wins.

In a perfect world, everyone would sign up for their benefits in a steady and staggered cadence, but we all know that things don’t always go perfectly. To supplement the procrastinators and last-minute enrollees that make a mad dash to sign up on the last day of open enrollment, we’ve made significant investments in our infrastructure and hardware to ensure that you and your employees won’t notice any difference in system speed or availability.

To further simplify things for our HR leaders, we have also made several enhancements to our Guided Renewal Tool, updating the user experience so that it’s easier than ever to renew your plans. As organizations move to offer a more robust benefits package, renewing each benefit can become cumbersome very quickly. The Guided Renewal Tool allows you to automate and quickly complete the renewal processes so you can focus your time on more strategic initiatives.

Building a strategic benefits package and making sure employees sign up for those benefits is the heart of benefits administration. Oftentimes, the strategic initiatives can get pushed to the wayside when other administrative tasks must be accomplished. To combat this, we’ve put an emphasis on enhanced integrations within our ecosystem to speed up and automate these tedious processes. In turn, our integrations provide increased access to real-time data exchange for an overall better experience.

With this release we are thrilled to add Paylocity to the PlanSource HCM Integration portfolio. Our seamless connection with Paylocity allows HR teams to leverage the power of our benefits administration solution directly within the Paylocity system. With our API integration, employees can add and update their information, while administrators can update new hire information, terminations and any general employee changes, all in real-time. Employees can seamlessly access PlanSource right from their Paylocity experience without having to remember a new username or password.

You will also see that we have enabled all eligible Boost integrations to further modernize the employee and HR experience. With Boost, we have partnered with leading insurance carriers to provide real-time modern API integrations, simplified self-billing and an optimized shopping experience. By enabling these integrations for anyone using a Boost carrier, you will see increased participation, owing to a much less cumbersome enrollment experience since everything will stay in the PlanSource system and there’s no need to jump back and forth between a carrier site and your enrollment.

After a summer filled with fun, sun, and catching up on good times that had previously been put on hold, we want your Open Enrollment to be equally as stress-free and the updates and enhancements we’re putting in place will help support that.

If you’re as excited as we are about the upcoming release, be sure to check out these resources available for more info!

• Check out the detailed Release Notes here for a deep-dive into the exciting features
• Join our Chief Technology Officer, Srini Venkatramani during our Weekly Source video series as he discusses our strategy with this release
• Visit our Celadon Release landing page for more information and to watch our on demand webinar