With the support of specialists in Oracle HCM cloud solutions, Innovative Methods Consulting – an Oracle Fusion Applications Consulting Company – will assist you in implementing or improving your employee benefits system. This way, we can enable your organization to respond quickly to changes in the moder-day business landscape worldwide, increase productivity through collaboration, and facilitate information exchange among its various human resources management (HRM) departments.
Through this informative blog post, we intend to provide an in-depth overview of services for the Oracle HCM Cloud Technology solutions, using Oracle’s standard methodology for such initiatives. This methodology enables rapid enablement of Oracle HCM Cloud Benefits – an integral part of the Oracle HCM Cloud Technology. Following a leading business practice and a standard methodology backed by comprehensive documentation, this guide will help you understand the key benefits of implementing a unified global human resources solution throughout your organization to engage your employees, align common HR processes, and promote a culture of compliance.
Keep reading!
HCM CLOUD BENEFITS (OTBI) Open Enrollment Dashboard
Oracle HCM Cloud Benefits is a complete set of solution based on Oracle HCM Cloud Technology for efficiently managing employee benefits. This set of solution creates a centralized platform for administration, personalized options for workforce, compliance with standards and regulations, and insights into benefit costs and participation.
HCM CLOUD BENEFITS (OTBI) Open Enrollment Dashboard – an integral solution – assists the benefits department management of their employee benefits data and the downstream actionable benefits data throughout the Open Enrollment phases.
OTBI has become a flexible global tool to be configured that allows organizations to evolve and adapt to the unique needs of their workforce. It has been become an integral part of a total compensation package implemented by an organization.
OTBI is based on Oracle HCM Cloud Technology with its analytics feature can offer both traditional “one-size-fits-all” plans and highly complex plans targeted at different segments of the workforce with different benefit packages. This innovative technology features a benefits self-service, which presents the employee with an intuitive process that guides them through selecting their benefits.
Additionally, employees can review and update their contacts as part of the guided enrollment process and select dependents and/or beneficiaries at the end of the enrollment process.
The set of solutions offered by Oracle HCM Cloud Technology OTBI includes:
- A hierarchy of core benefits objects that can be completed at four different levels:
- Programs – A program refers to a package of benefit offerings defined at the top of the hierarchy;
- Plan types – A plan type is used to assign a category to Benefit Plans;
- Plans – A Plan is a specific offering within a plan type and is available for enrollment.
- Options – An Option is an eligible choice within a plan or plan type.
- It also includes life event configuration. A life event refers to any change in a person that impacts their eligibility or cost calculations for benefits. These may include:
- Employment events, such as new hires, promotions, terminations, and transfers;
- Personal life events, such as marital status and address changes; and
- Time-based events, such as changes in age and service duration.
- Define different benefit programs that include multiple plans. Benefit plans sharing similar eligibility and enrollment rules can be grouped according to plan types. Eligibility is determined individually, based on configured rules, for each employee. Key benefits of OTBI and Oracle HCM Cloud analytics technology are integrated into the Core HR Solution Set (the essential tasks and processes that an HR department needs to get done on a daily basis). Thus, the employee’s personal and employment information along with relevant employee life events in Core HR are automatically detected and processed.
- Support all types of enrollment processing: on-demand, automatic, event-driven, and scheduled/open enrollment. Rules can be defined to extend current enrollment, cancel current enrollment, and apply default enrollment under specific circumstances.
- Benefits Service Center, a tool used by the Benefits Specialist in the administrative office to assist employees.
- Security setup drives four distinct views of the system, namely, the benefits administrator, benefits manager, benefits specialist, and employee.
- Note that benefits management usage depends on specific variations and plans as well as their reporting set. These vary in degree and complexity by country or region. However, if benefits are required for other countries, this is considered and defined during your service proposal.
Core Advantages of the Benefits Business Process
The Benefits Business Process as an integral part of Oracle HCM Cloud Technology can enable your organization to:
- Extend benefits to employees in addition to compensation.
- Automate administration of corporate policies regarding eligibility, enrollment, rates, and coverage.
- Define the design of the benefits plan and program.
- Conduct unrestricted or event-based enrollments for participants, batch processing, and reporting.
- Enable self-service enrollment for benefit participants.
- Manage ongoing enrollment changes for participants, dependent designation, beneficiary designation, certifications, and action items.
- Manage annual open enrollment.
- Additionally, Oracle Fusion Applications allow the user to create a rules-based application where configuration objects can be reused in different jurisdictions.
Applicable Industries
The Oracle HCM Cloud Technology solution is applicable across all industries; there are no “industry-specific variations.”
Technology / Prerequisites
The cloud product referred to in the Oracle HCM Cloud Technology solution set must be properly provisioned before the delivery of this solution:
- Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud Service
- Oracle Integration Cloud Service (optional)
Integration
The following table shows the data integrations that will be enabled in the delivery of this set of solutions.
| Integration | Description |
| Benefits Extract | The Benefits Extract tool allows the administrator to extract enrollment records and produces a pre-formatted generic HR-XML file. |
Data Upload
The following table shows the data loads that will be run as part of this solution set. Standard execution will occur based on available file-based data loaders (data imports).
| Data Load | Description |
| Data Load | For the benefits process, data loads are typically not required, as the required data is expected to be available as part of the core HR solution set. |
Duration For Implementation
It usually takes 10-12 weeks to implement standard assets for this solution. A project using the Total Control Methodology (TCM) methodology is anticipated for its adoption. This does not include client-specific updates and additions.
Optional Services
Organizations considering the global core HR solutions set may also consider the following options to complement, enhance, or add to this functionality.
| Optional Services | Description |
| Pre-built integration Customer-specific integration Country localization and roll-out
Additional Benefit Plans
Inclusion of Benefits in Total Compensation Statement
Training Options | Innovative Methods Consulting offers several predefined integration options: SAP (outgoing), NetIA/Active Directory, and others. Innovative Methods Consulting assists in creating custom inbound or outbound integrations based on available Oracle Cloud technologies. It is possible to implement this set of solutions in one or multiple countries.
For clients with additional benefit plans to configure based on different employee populations, life events, variable rates, and coverages, these can optionally be implemented under the Additional Benefit Plans service. If the client is also implementing the Workforce Rewards solutions set, then optionally, benefit information can also be included as part of the total compensation statement at an additional cost.
Employee data history can be migrated as an additional service. Details of the data included in this service will be defined with you. |
Processes That Are Impacted
The main benefit administration processes include:
- Managing benefit plans, programs, and events
- Maintaining benefit enrollments
- Elected benefits
These processes can be initiated from various points within the system:
- Standard module workflows
- My team screen
- Employee self-service
Macro Flow
The business process of employee benefits lifecycle management, which starts from plan definition and extends to automation in payroll calculation.
Final Recommendations
We strongly advise reviewing the key features of your implementation alongside an expert, as cloud adoption services are an integral part of the services provided. They help clients develop a cloud adoption strategy, encompassing communication, training, and user support strategies. A Business Impact Analysis (BIA) – a critical component of the business continuity planning process – will serve as the foundation for defining these strategies. Cloud adoption services will enable the client organization to embrace the changes brought about by implementing the Oracle Cloud solution. The focus in this comprehensive Oracle HCM Cloud implementation guide throughout is to ensure that the client derives optimal benefit from the application by using it as intended and by enabling successful solution adoption by users.