Editor’s Note: As the leader in HCM technology consulting services, HRchitect has been working with the UltiPro system for more than a decade. Working with dozens of Ultimate Software clients across North America, our UltiPro experience includes Project Management, Configuration, Process Analysis/Redesign, Training, Optimization, Reporting, Integration, Change Management, and Ongoing Support.
Date: August 3, 2017 2:00 PM EDT
Ultimate Software, a leading provider of human capital management (HCM) solutions in the cloud, announced today that Crescent Hotels & Resorts, one of the largest operators of hotels and resorts in the United States and employer of thousands of employees, is using UltiPro to improve HCM, including the benefits open enrollment and benefits management experience for its employees.
Crescent Hotels & Resorts is one of an exclusive group of independent management companies approved to operate all brands within the Marriott, Hilton, Starwood, Hyatt, Wyndham Worldwide, and InterContinental brand families. Crescent manages approximately 100 hotel locations in the United States across 25 states. The company’s workforce has a wide range of educational backgrounds, English fluency, and computer skills.
Prior to UltiPro, Crescent’s process for managing benefits and employee changes was labor-intensive and time consuming. For example, the company’s completely manual benefits enrollment process included the printing, preparation, and distribution of benefits guides, enrollment kits, information sessions, and the data entry of benefits. It also required employee reminders, manual collection of forms, updates and corrections because of incomplete or erroneous elections, and executive reporting which had to be compiled for senior leaders using spreadsheets. In addition, HR or operations team members at each location had to devote time and effort to open enrollment tasks as well as employee updates due to life event changes.
“Our manual process, administered by local staff who were not benefits specialists, increased the likelihood of costly issues,” said Gustavo Serbia, vice president of human resources at Crescent Hotels. “The potential liability and costs were high—such as enrollment of ineligible employees, inaccurate personal data, supplemental life elections made without the proper evidence of insurability, or failure to follow established limits. We recognized that deploying open enrollment and qualifying events with UltiPro could help us benefit the business and our employees by ensuring both accuracy and efficiency.”
Crescent Hotels began deployment of UltiPro Benefits Enrollment in February 2016, with completion required by the start of open enrollment in mid-April. The company was committed to moving the entire organization to the online process that covered four medical plans, two dental plans, one vision plan, supplemental life options, short- and long-term elections, FSA and HSA, plus accident and critical illness plans. The active enrollment required all eligible employees to make an election, even to decline or keep existing coverage.
“After a two-month deployment from start to finish, the launch of UltiPro for benefits open enrollment process was a huge success,” said Jeff McMillan, corporate director of payroll at Crescent Hotels & Resorts. “The entire organization used the process, with no interruption of coverage to employees. We reduced the number of labor hours across the organization, automated election approval status reports to our locations, and provided our leadership with frequent real-time reporting.”
Crescent is also using UltiPro to manage the healthcare eligibility process by directly communicating with employees through UltiPro, rather than using paper, such as notifying employees of their ability to enroll or decline coverage. The company is also able to provide automated email notifications to eligible new hires that explain how to enroll.
“The move to UltiPro for open enrollment will save us about $30,000 per year, with the savings coming from the reduction in labor hours and material preparation required to complete open enrollment manually,” said Serbia. “These savings are just one part of our overall return on investment with UltiPro.”
“UltiPro is designed not only to deliver substantial efficiencies compared with manual, paper-based processes, but also to be deployed quickly with exceptional support services,” said Greg Swick, global chief sales officer at Ultimate. “We’re very pleased that UltiPro has been able to simplify Crescent Hotel’s benefits open enrollment process, and provide Crescent with measurable business results.”
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