Strategic Materials
Saving valuable HR time and resources through benefits administration outsourcing
Strategic Materials is North America’s largest and most comprehensive glass recycler. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Strategic Materials is a leading recycling company with facilities across the United States and Canada. With over 100 years of history and nearly 50 plants, Strategic Materials is the premier source of recycled glass. With a focus on operational excellence and process innovation, Strategic Materials strides to consistently meet clients’ evolving expectations.
Houston, TX
Environmental Services
1,000+
Strategic Materials
This service is incredible because we don’t have to touch it! We don’t have to handle any of the calculations or spreadsheet manipulations. We literally send one email to handle 100% of the invoices to our carriers – that’s as involved as it gets!
Courtney Scardino
Regional HR Business Partner, Strategic Materials
Strategic Materials Incorporated is the largest glass processor in North America. The company has over 40 operating facilities across the United States and Canada and operates with a lean HR team of only 6 employees that handle everything from data entry and payroll to recruiting, hiring, benefits administration and more.
With a modest human resources team tasked with managing units across two countries, it’s not hard to see how Strategic Materials frequently ran into issues communicating with and managing their remote, multilingual workforce.
Additionally, the recycling industry is very demanding and traditionally has a very high turnover rate. Strategic Materials wanted a better way to put benefits front and center as a differentiator to help with recruiting and retention efforts without overwhelming the already busy HR team.
And, Strategic Materials wanted to enhance the benefits experience from an administrative perspective with a more robust and flexible platform with more accurate data, customizable reporting and a partner that offered a hands-on, high-touch approach.
- Diverse, mulit-lingual workforce spread across multiple locations
- Data integrity and accuracy concerns
- Missing core benefits features and functionality
- Inadequate and inflexible reporting
- Lack of service and timely issue resolution
After a thorough vetting process, Strategic Materials announced PlanSource as their new partner for a full benefits outsourcing solution. The enhanced offering included a full benefits administration upgrade, an employee contact center, benefits billing and reconciliation, COBRA administration and a dedicated team to ensure a smooth and timely implementation.
Strategic Materials offered the mobile-friendly benefits platform for enrollment and supported these efforts with mobile kiosks in the manufacturing plants where employees could easily upload required documents, like birth or marriage certificates, and the employee contact center for on-demand enrollment. These enhancements supported the diverse workforce by providing more enrollment opportunities, particularly for employees that might not have a personal computer at home.
In addition to a stress-free and timely launch, Strategic Materials was able to invest in PlanSource and absorb a slight rate increase from the carrier without passing that cost onto employees. This was a huge win for the company as they made several strategic changes to help provide a better benefits package to employees and were able to do so at no additional cost.
- Employee Contact Center: A fully-certified call center to service all employees (including support for Spanish-speaking employees)
- Dedicated Account Manager: A dedicated account manager and full support from the implementation team during onboarding and training
- Benefits Billing Service: Gathers monthly carrier bills, calculates self- reported totals, audits bills, handles payment to the insurance carrier and resolves any issues that might pop-up during the process
- Robust Features and Functionality: An intuitive and mobile-friendly experience that makes benefits education and enrollment easy and accessible to all employees
Overall, employees were very satisfied with the enrollment experience. More than 50% of employees enrolled via the contact center, and having the extra support from the PlanSource team freed up the HR team to focus on other important initiatives, like engagement and retention.
The investment in PlanSource will allow Strategic Materials to consistently increase the value of their benefits package, making benefits more sophisticated and competitive over time. They have saved countless hours of administrative work, allowing them to focus on better servicing their employees in meaningful and impactful ways.
- Added an employer contribution to HSA accounts.
- Created a new rate structure that correlated with an employees’ salary tier. have lower salaries than corporate office employees.
- Added three new worksite products from Metlife: Accident, Critical Illness, Hospital Indemnity.
- Increased 401(k) match and improved vesting schedule.
Easier
Enrollment
Streamlined Open Enrollment
so that 6 HR pros can now handle
40 locations
Data Accuracy
PlanSource’s trusted reporting
creates solid customizable reporting
Superior Service
More than 50% of employees
enrolled via the contact center