Associations
SBC works with associations that are fund administrators for plans with multiple employers. These associations may include faith-based organizations that service various entities, including churches, hospitals and schools. In addition, we count non-profit clients in this associations sector.
The commonality between these clients is that Lifeworks tracks different benefit provisions, manages each employer's unique data, and manages billing and receivables for the employer and employee.
One of the biggest challenges faced by clients in this sector is managing employees who have multiple employments within the association. For instance, if a minister moves from parish to parish over the course of a career. Or, if a minister pastors two churches at the same time (concurrent employment). Lifeworks offers the flexibility and accuracy required to administers these and similar circumstances.
Case Study: Christian Schools lnternational
Christian Schools lnternational's (CSI) benefit plans have a long history. For decades, CSI has been helping Christian schools in Canada and the United States provide a fuller roster of benefits for their employees. SBC helps CSI with the software needed to administer their pension, life and health insurance plans domestically and abroad. CSI services over 20,000 participants across 230 schools.
CSI has been an SBC client since 1989, and they use the following services:
- Defined Benefit solution
- Health & Welfare solution
- Billing Management solution for pension, insurance and retiree contributions
- Employee Self-Service module
Challenge: Manual Salary Change Process
Annual salary change was manual and required lots of "exception" processing.
Solution:
Automated annual salary changes and created online flow for managing salary exceptions:
- Automated import of annual salary changes
- Imported changes automatically trigger events for eligibility and enrollment
- Billing items are automatically adjusted
- Back-office screen flow created that allowed for exception processing. Impact to invoiced amounts are displayed for confirmation and an adjustment invoice is sent to impacted schools.
Challenge: Mid-Year Benefit Changes
A new benefit was needed mid-year in Canada that required a fast turnaround.
Solution:
Through the rules configuration, additional rules and range tables were created to accommodate the change. The change was implemented, tested, and moved to CSI's production environment within weeks.
Challenge: Billing Cycle Run Erroneously
On occasions, the billing invoices were run in the system before necessary approval or sign-off was provided, resulting in a need to reverse the process.
Solution:
Through CSI and other client feedback, a new Invoice Reversal enhancement was added to the platform, which was made available to all clients. This functionality allows the clients to reverse the most recent invoice cycle. This allows for any final processing that may need to be completed before re-running the invoice.
Case Study: Church Pension Group
The Church Pension Group (CPG) administers the pension and life insurance benefits for all clerical and lay positions within the Episcopal Church. They service over 10,000 parishes, dioceses, schools and organizations throughout the United States, Mexico and Liberia, including over 40,000 active and retired clergy, lay and survivors.
CPG has been an SBC client since 2003. They use the following services:
- Defined Benefit solution
- Life Insurance administration
- Billing Management solution for retirement contributions
- Trustee retiree payroll transmission
- Valuation data transmission
- Employer Self-Service solution (upcoming)
Challenge: Automation within CPG's Unique Business Framework
While CPG embraced the idea of automation and simplification of their administrative practices, they wanted robust processes to be built around the way they did business.
Solution:
While best practices and standards for processing exist to provide efficiency and ease of implementation, the system is designed to accommodate client specific rules and administrative practices.
- Screens and process flows were created to handle client events such as "New Cure" and "Newly Ordained."
- Our software was configured to "automate" CPG's exceptions processing, such as manual billing adjustments.
Challenge: Integrate Data Across Seven Business Units
Each of CPG's business unit was running its own system. Each system stored data that is commonly used across all business units. CPG wanted to provide better customer service and reduce data discrepancies.
Solution:
- Through real-time web messaging, our software sends and receives data updates to a central data repository.
- Changes are no longer duplicated.
- Clients only need to call one business unit to process demographic updates such as name and address changes.
Challenge: Multiple Retroactive Events
CPG relied heavily on the timely submission of employment and salary changes by the sponsoring church or organization. Many times, these notifications came many months after the actual occurrence of the event. Often these retroactive changes spanned multiple qualifying events to the same individual.
Solution:
- Our effective dated, event based processing allowed CPG to process multiple retroactive events for the same individual.
- Events trigger automatic adjustments or credits to receivables already invoiced.
- Changes to invoiced amounts can be seen immediately upon entering the change.
- An adjusted invoice can be created on demand and submitted to the sponsoring church.
- Credits can be tracked and applied to a future invoice.
- Credits also can be issued as a refund.