CUSTOMER PROFILE
For more than 40 years, McGohan Brabender has helped employers select, understand, and communicate their employee benefits. As one of the five largest independent employee benefits brokerage and communication firms in the country, McGohan Brabender has the knowledge, skills, and most importantly, the people, to help employers take care of their most – valuable asset – their workforce.

McGohan Brabender provides brokerage, account management, consulting, and communication services to more than 1,200 public and private employer groups in the Dayton, Cincinnati, and Columbus regions. The brokerage and consulting services are provided by a staff of 100-plus full-time professionals – all experts in their chosen field of work. Each McGohan Brabender client is assigned to a specific team to ensure personal, responsive service. Other McGohan Brabender staff work to offer employer groups ongoing value-added services – capitalizing on the talents and energy of each other to create a unique synergy.

THE CHALLENGE
Recognizing that its clients needed to reduce the amount of time they spent on routine benefit administrative tasks and focus on more strategic HR and benefit issues, McGohan Brabender decided to offer its clients HR outsourcing services in 2003. As part of its offering, the company wanted to invest in online benefits management solutions to help their clients eliminate paper-based benefits administration and enrollment processes that were too labor intensive and cumbersome.

THE SOLUTION
After evaluating several benefits technology solution vendors, McGohan Brabender chose EbixBenergy (formerly known as Benergy Interworks) solutions including EbixBenergy Communications and Enrollment Services. With these solutions, McGohan Brabender is differentiating itself from the competition by delivering clients a complete benefits management system online, including information on benefits, health and wellness issues, and HR policies and procedures. By providing employees and their families easy 24/7 access to centralized information, they are able to make better, more informed decisions.

McGohan Brabender uses Enrollment Services to help employers manage open and new hire enrollment, qualifying life event changes, and voluntary benefits campaigns. Enrollment Services’ intuitive election screens help employees review and update personal and dependant data before they make each benefit election. The eligibility rules and logic configured into the system eliminate mistakes that often plague the paper enrollment process. When finished, employees can view and print a confirmation statement.

Enrollment Services is integrated with EbixBenergy Communications, a robust communications platform that gives employees access to plan-specific information, multimedia plan tours, needed forms and contact information, modeling tools, and extensive health and wellness resources. Filled with extensive consumer-friendly information, images, videos and interactive tools, the health and wellness resources help to educate employees and their families on a variety of medical and wellness topics.

THE RESULT
With EbixBenergy Communications and Enrollment Services, McGohan Brabender is able to deliver a better benefits experience to its clients, reducing time associated with administrative tasks by 50 percent, and eliminating paper-based processes that help them improve the entire employee lifecycle process.

“We liked the solutions, including the features, functionality, and market¬ability, and our customers agree,” said David Homan, vice president and shareholder of McGohan Brabender. “Our clients tell us they get time back in their day as soon as the solutions are implemented. In fact, some HR managers have, for the first time, been able to go home during open enrollment at 5 p.m. Without a doubt, EbixBenergy has helped us with client retention – our clients can’t stop using it.”

With the Enrollment Services, McGohan Brabender clients have complete control of their enrollment process and plans, including the plans and options that employees are selecting. Once elections are reviewed, Enrollment Services then reports employees’ decisions to carriers, as well as to the employer’s payroll system.

“With new health care reform rules going into effect, it will be more important than ever for employers to maintain compliance,” continued Homan. “EbixBenergy helps organizations achieve HR compliance with the latest regulations through a robust reporting package and required benefits documentation, all of which minimizes a company’s risk of security violations, giving them peace of mind.”