Customers
The New Summary Plan Description Process
Overview
This U.S. based off-price apparel and home fashions retailer has more than 110,000 employees worldwide. With eight businesses and more than 2,300 stores, they are ranked 133 in the most recent Fortune 500 rankings and include 5 store brands in the U.S., 2 in Canada, and 1 serving the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The Challenge
Like many retail organizations, they have multiple benefit plans, numerous suppliers and over 16 unions. They were faced with an uphill struggle every fall - plan providers deliver the program design updates for the following year, and in turn, the benefit team needs to translate these details into SPDs within a specific timeframe.
Although the HR team created a best practices template to accurately collect plan design information, it was time-intensive to manually update 24 SPDs. They needed a faster, easier way to communicate changes to their employees.
SPDs are more than just essential for ensuring that employees are participating in the most appropriate health and wellness programs. They're demanded by union groups and required by law. UNITE, formerly the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, has 16 chapters represented within the organization - all needing updates.
| Represented groups in the organization | |
| Unions | 16 |
| Non-Union | 5 |
| Number of documents needing to be created and/or updated | |
| Templates | 3 |
| Supplements | 5 |
The Solution: HighRoads
By using the HighRoads Summary Plan Description Solution, this U.S. based retailer was able to automate and streamline the process of updating its health and welfare SPDs in order to ensure regulatory and union compliance, and provide employees current information in a timely manner.
With HighRoads, they were able do the following:
- Create 3 standardized SPD templates based on current SPD documents that can be leveraged across the organization. This ensures that changes to SPDs automatically update the appropriate areas and that a full audit trail of changes and approvals is available for review.
- Create 5 supplements that covered additional benefit schedules not included in the SPDs.
- Using an automated/integrated technology and process to lower ultimate cost and time to produce and maintain its SPDs.
- Producing and storing SPDs in a format (i.e., MS Word with conversion to PDF) that allows for easy printing and posting to the company's intranet.
The Results
Leveraging the HR team's core knowledge of their SPD templates, HighRoads was able to turn around new SPDs in a fraction of the time required by the traditional approach.
Now, when sections need to be built across more than one plan, they can do it simultaneously. If there is a change to a COBRA provision across multiple SPD documents, the team can make the change in one area - and it's automatically plugged into the other SPDs in seconds. The efficiencies of its new process will compound, year after year, as changes become merely a matter of plug-and-play.