Preview new benefits capabilities for Dynamics 365 Human Resources
As the war for talent intensifies, companies are offering a broader and richer set of benefits to attract and retain their best employees. We understand that this can be a complex and time-consuming process. Our new benefits capabilities in Dynamics 365 Human Resources will help with benefits administration by providing more flexible plan configurations, as well as enable open enrollment and life event changes through self-service experiences. These new capabilities are available today in preview, and will be generally available as part of the 2020 Release Wave 1.
Here’s an overview of the upcoming benefits capabilities.
Enhanced plan configuration
Benefit plans often have different costs depending on the characteristics of the policy holder. For example, life insurance rates can vary based on gender and age. With our benefits capabilities, complex rate tables can be setup to capture differences in rates for age, salary, gender, full time equivalent designation, job type, compensation region, and compensation level. Benefits can be bundled together to ensure that employees select the correct prerequisite plans before selecting dependent plans, enabling a seamless self-serve experience. These enhancements will allow HR professionals to offer a richer set of plans to employees.
Efficient administration
With additional flexibility often comes complexity. As we have introduced these new capabilities, we will have focused on providing an efficient administration process. Plans can be configurable to enable auto enrollment based on the previous year enrollments. Also, life event processing is supported and integrated into employee self-service. Life events, as listed in IRS section 125 are supported, as well as other events such as the ability to age out of benefits, loss of spousal coverage, or even employee address changes. Administrators can choose which life events to process and how to process them by plan type, so they can administer benefits based on their unique company and regulatory policies. Lastly, employees can self- serve via an open enrollment shopping cart experience.
Extensive eligibility setup
The benefits capabilities will provide the flexibility needed to setup multiple types of eligibility rules and coverage options. Benefit managers can easily create flexible and robust eligibility rules that ensure the right benefits are available for the right employees in an easy to use experience. Custom fields can also be used within the eligibility process to ensure that a company’s unique eligibility rules set can be met.
Flex credit programs
Companies often want to showcase the cost of benefits to employees as well as give the employees control over the way they spend their benefit dollars to help them align to their unique needs. With the enhanced benefits capabilities, flex credit programs can be established to support the scenarios above. Also, flex credits can be prorated to support retirement and other life event changes.
With these new benefits capabilities in Dynamics 365 Human Resources, we will now offer our customers more flexibility to support unique benefit scenarios in a flexible and easy to use experience. We’re excited to bring these features, including advanced rates, life event processing, enhanced eligibility, and many more, to your organization. Learn more about these and other features headed to Dynamics 365 Human Resources in the coming months, including updates to leave and absence management.
