hen Chuck Moore was hired several years ago to upgrade WellPoint’s HR
management system, administration of even basic employee documents at the
company was a significant problem. The HR staff received up to 2,000 faxes a
month that required some amount of data entry, but because everyone in the
department hated dealing with the paperwork, entering the data was "the lowest
priority, to be done at the end of the day," Moore says. Consequently,
critical documents piled up in HR in-baskets, delaying filing and frustrating
employees, who logged up to 14,000 calls per month to the company’s human
resources call center. "At that time, a six-week turnaround to complete a pay
increase was considered good, and errors in all of the data were common,"
Moore says.
The company initially implemented PeopleSoft 7.5 to centralize the HR
databases, then upgraded to 8.0 in 2001 to take advantage of the new version’s
self-service features. PeopleSoft 8.0 allows employees to see benefits options,
update personal information, and view their pay history and 401(k) data online
at any time. Managers can administer employee change information, such as pay
increases and title changes, and complete employee reviews without sending hard
copies to the HR department to be entered into the system.
WellPoint went live with the new version in August, with considerable
success. Employees started using it almost immediately with little training or
encouragement, Moore says. As of November 2002, the self-service system had
tracked 17,000 separate users for the year, and managers had initiated an
average of 300 promotions and 40 salary changes per month online.
"Now when data is entered in the self-service system, it’s done by
employees and the information is updated immediately." That means, for
example, that a payroll increase shows up on the employee’s next paycheck--not
six weeks later.
As a result, costs have been reduced dramatically and quality has improved
immensely, Moore says. Within months of going live, paper flow to the HR
department almost disappeared. In 2001 they received 63,000 separate pieces of
paper; by November 2002 they had received fewer than 1,100 documents for the
year, most of them via e-mail.
But the most obvious example of the success of the self-service system was
the ease with which the company completed its open enrollment in 2002. In the
past, WellPoint outsourced open enrollment to a vendor, which required months of
planning and resulted in many errors and mishaps. Moore’s team used to begin
planning for open enrollment eight months before the event, working with the
vendor to design documents and establish the process. "It was a huge task that
cost a lot of money and took an enormous amount of time," he says.
However, since the installation of self-service, "open enrollment has
become a non-event," Moore says. In 2002, forms and benefits information were
available online, and employees were e-mailed reminders to complete their
enrollment by the end of October. "On the last day of enrollment, more than
2,000 people made changes and there were no breakdowns," he says. And he
estimates that the reduction in man-hours, paper costs, and errors saved the
company $400,000.
Except for monitoring the number of enrollment submissions and fielding
calls, the HR team wasn’t involved at all, Moore says. "It trivialized the
enrollment process, which means we can apply our resources to other projects
such as improving recruiting efforts and reducing turnover."
It has also changed the makeup of WellPoint’s HR team. "We don’t rely
on administrative assistants anymore," Moore says. "Our focus now is on
employee relationship management."
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