Customers
OVERVIEW
Florida Power & Light Company is the principal subsidiary of FPL Group, Inc. It is nationally known as a high quality, efficient and customer-driven organization focused on energy-related products and services. Florida Power & Light serves 4.3 million customer accounts in Florida.
FPL Group, Inc. has over 12,000 unionized and non-unionized employees. To support these employees, Florida Power & Light offers 35 employee benefits plan designs from 15 suppliers.
THE CHALLENGE
Florida Power & Light has a small HR department with limited resources. To service a large and diverse workforce, Florida Power & Light offered a large number of employee benefits programs from many suppliers. The HR department periodically put these programs out to bid to ensure employees have access to plans that suit their needs at the most competitive rates. With multiple plans scheduled to be put out to bid annually, Florida Power & Light's small HR staff faced a significant challenge in completing this task in a timely manner while continuing to handle other day-to-day responsibilities.
Florida Power & Light also had challenges with the management and storage of its benefits data. Storing the data in an centralized location allowing easy access by several groups within the organization was critical.
Florida Power & Light was in need of a solution that would solve these issues and help HR staff members do their job better. After evaluating their options, Florida Power & Light selected HighRoads to help simplify data collection and management, streamline day-to-day operations, and improve the procurement process.
THE SOLUTION: HIGHROADS
HighRoads helped Florida Power & Light overcome their challenges with:
Streamlined Procurement Process - HighRoads was used to build the RFP event, distribute the RFPs to suppliers, collect the proposals, handle re-bids, and consolidate all responses for analysis. The reverse auction capability allowed suppliers to submit proposals then instantly see where they ranked against other suppliers based on their bid. Since suppliers had the ability to submit new bids up to the closing of the event in order to improve their ranking, a competitive environment was created. This competitive environment has allowed Florida Power & Light to obtain lower plan cost and more concessions and performance guarantees than the traditional RFP process. Additionally, the reports generated reduced the amount of time spent on analyzing RFP results.
Better information management - HighRoads is used to manage over 150 benefits related documents. These include plan designs and pricing models RFPs as well as non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and supplier performance guarantees. All information is stored in a central location and in a standard format. The online storage of these documents is part of Florida Power & Light's disaster recovery plan.
Improved supplier performance management - HighRoads is used to monitor and manage the performance of suppliers. On a quarterly basis, these suppliers are evaluated on up to 14 areas to ensure that their plans are meeting agreed upon guidelines and providing employees with superior levels of support. The management dashboard provides a high-level overview and trouble areas can be quickly identified for follow-up before they become problems.
Improved transparency and audit trail - To ensure fairness during the bidding and supplier selection process, HighRoads ensures transparency by providing all suppliers with access to the same information and bidding process. Any objections to the bidding process or the awarding of the contract could be reviewed and resolved using the automatically created audit trail.
THE RESULTS
HighRoads generated considerable savings for Florida Power & Light while streamlining day-to-day processes. Some of the results experienced by Florida Power & Light are illustrated by the five RFPs conducted. In these procurement events, HighRoads produced:
- An average of 5 participating suppliers for each RFP
- An average of 2.26 bids per supplier
- An average cost reduction of 16% from initial to final bid
- A cycle time reduction of up to 50%
According to Melissa Miller, HR Manager, Employee Benefits at Florida Power & Light "The reverse auction capabilities provided by HighRoads gave us an idea of how low suppliers can really go. We are able to get concessions and performance guarantees that we would not have gotten otherwise."