Customer Success Story
Iowa Foundation for Medical Care/Encompass/IFQHC®
Deltek Employee Self Service™ — Increases Productivity and Reduces Costs
The Challenge
Iowa Foundation for Medical Care/Encompass/IFQHC® (IFMC) provides a diverse range of services to ensure Medicare and Medicaid patients receive high quality and cost-effective health care. IFMC's Corporate Support Services division is responsible for all human resources and benefits administration for nearly 700 employees in seven offices throughout the United States. IFMC implemented Deltek Employee Self Service (ESS) to replace its paper-based human resources and benefits systems.
“As our company grew over the years, our manual process of using hard copy forms for processing HR and benefits information became cumbersome, inefficient and prone to many errors,” said Anne Dennis, senior human resources manager, IFMC. “Our biggest challenge occurred at the end of each calendar year with open enrollment, which required the participation of every IFMC employee — which meant more paperwork from every employee at virtually the same time.”
For the IFMC Human Resources staff, the holiday season was overshadowed by extensive overtime to collect and key information before the December 31st deadline.
“Our staff is dedicated and hardworking, so we always met the deadline,” said Jaymie Banks, compensation and HRIS analyst. “But we knew there were better, more efficient options available to handle the open enrollment period — as well as the routine employee changes that occur throughout the year.”
The Solution
IFMC, a Deltek client since 1991, chose to implement Deltek Employee Self Service enterprise-wide.
“Deltek ESS allows every single person at IFMC to operate more efficiently and with greater accuracy, since employees now update and maintain some of their own records,” said Dennis. “We've had an immediate return on our investment by eliminating most of the paper and postage costs, as well as reducing the time it takes to make and record changes.”
The Benefits
Like all businesses, IFMC maintains a tremendous amount of information on every employee — from their home address and emergency contact information to their medical and 401(K) salary deferral — which is subject to periodic changes throughout the year.
With Deltek ESS, employees complete these “forms” from the convenience of their desktops. There are no papers to locate, complete or mail and once the data is entered by the employee, the new information is carried across all IFMC databases.
The benefits open enrollment period also requires action from each employee. With Deltek ESS, IFMC Human Resources staff no longer struggles with handling boxes of benefits information booklets and forms for each of the seven offices or deciphering the handwriting of employees.
“Our entire process is almost completely paperless now that all information, including plan explanations and forms are available on our intranet,” said Banks. “Now, as enrollment deadlines approach, we simply run a report that provides a list of employees who haven't responded and we send them a reminder e-mail. We are still available to help employees with questions, but we spend much more of our time working with employees and less time on data entry or tracking down missing paperwork.”
In addition, Deltek ESS provides IFMC employees with online access to most information that would traditionally require a phone call or visit to the HR office including:
- Tax withholding — view and change federal withholding status
- 401(K) — view contribution history and make changes
- Paycheck history — always available
“We were surprised at the number of people who need pay stub copies or other forms of income verification for mortgages or rentals,” said Dennis. “Now they can print their own copies and we're hearing comments like: ‘This is slick' and ‘This is great!' It's very refreshing.”