Ess/Mss Information Office or Portal

The ESS/MSS self-service apps run inside Portal. There is no more Information Office.

Beverly,

I have been using Self-service for a while and it works well (for the most part) but we do see some issues with Benefit enrollment. Sometimes the system does not correctly follow our rules for the required benefits. Consider implementing a process that looks at the active benefits following enrollment to ensure that associates have the correct number of plans....

Just something you should consider when you are implementing because the system will glitch from time to time and not enroll correctly. Lawson says it is something on the browser side of the transaction. (Also, make sure everyone knows not to use the browser back button or change the display for the bookmark to open the window without the tool bar.)

Good luck

Thanks for the info, can you elaborate on your comment "not enroll correctly". I'm racking my brains on the best way to ensure that all employees are enrolled in all benefits that they selected from the ESS.

Do you mean that someone could elect an optional coverage, lets say vision and think that they have it, but then it does not show up in the bs531 file at all?

I can't think of how we could correct that, as we would have never known that they selected the vision in this case.

Beverly, we just rolled out benefits online enrollment and I'd like to second the comments about benefits enrollment being hard to manage due to problems in the logic Lawson used.

I've had to fix quite a few bugs in the portal javascript code that caused problems with people enrolling.

One problem is that somehow, when someone selects a plan coverage option where they are supposed to select dependents, quite a few are finding some way to bypass the screen so they get by without attaching any dependents to the plan.  We had to set up one of our post-enrollment audits to catch this.  Still don't know how it is happening.  There is code there that usually catches it when I try myself, but apparently there is a way to bypass it.

The biggest problems were enrollments just not making it onto BS31.  People would go through like everything was OK, but a bug in the Lawson portal code would cause the portal to think that the employee was exiting when they clicked save.  This I fixed, it was due to someone clicking Exit and make elections later, then clicked cancel because they decided they really did want to save.  Was a really bad bug in the code and led to many calls back to employees to have them enroll again.

Anyways, we are on 8.0.3 env/apps, and have over 5000 benefits eligible employees, so it was pretty easy for us to see all types of errors.  The worst thing is that they are all very hard to reproduce because the employees usually don't know something is wrong until weeks later when you are auditing.

Jeremy Zerr
Reporting with Lawson