The Benefits of Portals

For one, it can extend the concept of online self-service and customization to a whole new level. In the workplace, it can offer lower administration costs, better efficiencies and higher employee satisfaction.

For the past few years, the trend towards online self-service via corporate intranets has had a growing impact on pension and benefits plan administration. The idea has been to offer employees and plan sponsors online access to information and transactional capabilities.

While only a few HR intranets operating in Canada have yet to move past the stage of presenting static information in HTML or PDF formats, technologically advanced plan sponsors are now offering personalized information, which includes measuring tools, health promotion, online enrolment and claims tracking. This level of functionality requires a complex integration of multiple systems and databases at the back end of the operation. That's because the front end is set up as a portal.

The most promising area of development for the benefits world lies with portal sites targeted at narrower audiences, such as HR professionals. For example, Global IQX, an applications software developer based in Ottawa, recently launched a health insurance portal called Connect Insure. It allows group insurance brokers to go online and get real-time insurance quotes over the Internet.

"The site initially started as an information resource centre and the online quoting was added in June," says Michael de Waal, president and chief executive officer of Global IQX. "The real-time quoting capability lets a broker get quotes for small business clients from several insurers within three to four minutes instead of three to four weeks. It's also possible to do enrolments online."

Despite the touted advantages of applying portal technology to HR functions like administration and employee communications, few Canadian companies have set up their own benefits portals. "As a product offering, benefits portals are still fairly new in Canada," says Keith Formosa, vice-president of Computer Workware Inc. of Toronto, which builds software applications for the insurance and benefits industry.

"In the U.S., benefits portals are now being used to offer a broad range of services to employees and are being customized to the employee population," says Formosa. Larger American corporations, he adds, are using portals to communicate with employees and administer pensions and benefits, as well as providing health and fitness information and planning, access to employee assistance plans, connections to payroll and even links to preferred online retailers.

Although adapting Web-based technology for administration and communication purposes in the benefits world is nothing new, portals represent an evolution of corporate intranets into more user-friendly, and usually more powerful, formats, says Jeffery Schmidt, a partner with Toronto-based Morneau Sobeco. "Portals are designed to provide more direct and easy access to information which promotes self-service, allowing employees to focus on their work and freeing HR resources for more strategic and value-added functions."

For a benefits portal to fulfill its promise, a user should be able to log on to one site, enter a personal identification number (PIN) and password and have instant access to every bit of information that's relevant to that particular employee. From that one point of entry, an employee would be able to tap into all their personal data including beneficiaries, employee pensions and savings plans, benefits plans, employee assessments and payroll information.

An ideal site would also provide modeling tools to help employees make informed decisions before performing online transactions such as moving investments between funds and enrolling in flexible benefits. Yet, this vision of integrated or one-stop shopping on a portal-type site is still uncommon.

In fact, one of the biggest issues holding back portal development is the difficulty integrating all the systems that make up HR functions. "The fact that data is warehoused in multiple locations and managed by multiple applications makes integration quite challenging," says Schmidt.

For the most part, portals found in Canada's benefits industry today represent smaller bits of the one-stop shopping ideal. Instead of using one PIN and password to access personalized information, it is more likely that the user will start out at one site and then link up to several suppliers who provide their own miniature portals for plan members and sponsors.

Benefits providers such as Manulife Financial, Clarica and Sun Life have moved further into the realm of online self-service, which began in the mid-1990s with online transactions for pension plan members. Employees' desire to have more control over their affairs is one factor that is driving this move. Today, depending on the insurer, both retirement and health benefits are typically integrated on one site so the plan member only needs one PIN number to log in.

"It goes way beyond putting a booklet online," says Brigitte Parent, assistant vice-president, group marketing on the benefits side for Sun Life in Toronto. Sun Life and others have extensive sites where with an ID and PIN number, plan members have access to a wealth of benefits information.

"They can view their claims history, the status of claims and how much is left in their health spending accounts," says Parent. "People can find out about coverage such as visioncare, show how much is used and when the next recall for glasses is due. We've also just introduced a submission of claims online. People no longer have to mail their claims in and they receive an e-mail when the claims payment is deposited to their bank account."

Vanderwell Contractors (1971) Ltd. in Slave Lake, Alta., says being able to access self-service administration through its insurer's portal is an easy way to boost efficiency. Although she refers to it as a service centre rather than a benefits portal, Lynn McCotter, Vanderwell's accounting clerk, says that using her provider's site is a real time saver.

"Previously I had to send faxes to Montreal and because of the time lag I sometimes ran into problems," says McCotter. "Now I can add new members, terminate members and change anything such as status, wages or personal information immediately with no hassle." While such self-service sites may offer advantages, especially to companies that don't have access to their own intranet portals, they may have limitations and aren't true portals, insists Diane McElroy senior vice-president with Aon Consulting. "Sure, suppliers may offer what they call portals for self-service, but they can't provide one for everything. Most of them aren't customized and users have to wade through a lot of stuff before they get what they are looking for. And, most companies' HR programs have a myriad of suppliers. You really need one portal site that networks it all together in a navigation system that's intuitive and easy to use."

More and more options are becoming available. Although some of the latest developments aren't actually portals in their own right, they have the potential to become significant features of wider benefits portals built to service both employees and plan sponsors.

For instance, insurers are now busy interfacing their self-service sites for group plan customers with BCE Emergis Inc.'s integrated health and dental claims exchange.

Using the BCE Emergis engine, each insurer will be able to offer complete claims processing of benefits over the Web and create a seamless experience for their own customers who submit benefits claims online, explains Frank Preston, vice-president group insurance services for Clarica in Waterloo, Ont.

Another portal-type product making its way onto benefits self-service sites is GlobalMedic's Online Benefits Enrollment & Management Tool, which combines health benefits information and an enrollment tool. This tool is useful for administering flexible benefits, says Fernand Taras, GlobalMedic's president and chief executive officer in Montreal. There are a lot of players for enrollment systems, but Taras maintains that his firm has gone a step further by combining health information to help plan members select benefits packages to suit their particular health needs.

Organizations considering expanding their self-service capabilities through intranet or extranet portals have many choices to make. Should the company build and host its own portal or should the whole thing be outsourced? "It is generally the case that only large organizations can build a business case to support the internal creation of a portal and support its operation in terms of cost, infrastructure, etc.," says Schmidt.

There are options for smaller businesses, though. Some third-party benefits administrators are offering online benefits administration which can be branded so that the front end looks like it is the company's own site, says Cindy Robinson, general manager for Canadian Benefit Administrators Ltd. in Toronto.

If customization isn't important or cost is an issue, it might be enough to link into suppliers' portals. "There might not be much value to a small company setting up its own portal when it can subscribe to a lever," says Formosa.

Another question is whether the portal should be on an intranet or extranet site. "Unlike most intranets, extranets (private networks) offer the advantage of being accessible from anywhere at anytime," Schmidt says. "For pension and benefits self-service applications, you want to encourage employees to enroll at home where they can consult their families. But, few people can dial into intranets from outside without special software."

And who should design a benefits portal--the company's information technology department, an independent Web developer or a benefits communications specialist? Whichever option you choose, it's critical to have the input of an HR expert who understands how the site will be used, says McElroy. "Plan sponsors want self-service sites built around a strategy that adds personal value to users. You can't forget that the HR site is a communications tool for the user."

Where will it all go from here? More and more traditional HR functions are moving online, empowering employees through self-service and streamlining administration for HR staff. The next trick will be to figure out whether this technology is really fulfilling the promise of lowering benefits costs and raising employee satisfaction. BC