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When processing benefits in Vista 3.2,
have you ever wondered what is the purpose of the “Process
Only Queued Recipients” check box?
When this is checked, the Benefits
Processing module only processes people who have an
entry in the BELQUEUE table, which is basically just
a list of person ids. So, why might this be valuable
and how can you make use of this feature?
Any time you make a change to someone’s
information that might affect benefits, you must run
Benefits Processing for that person to reflect the modification.
Generally, the most common of these are changes in benefits,
payroll, or HR status; however, changes in address,
union status, etc., can also affect benefits.
If your benefits administrator processes
these kinds of transactions on a regular basis, then
the workload can be overbearing, since each transaction
requires a change to the data AND a submission of a
“Little Ben” for that person. Using the
“Process Only Queued Recipients” feature,
you can eliminate the second step, halving your workload.
There are two keys to making this work.
1. There must be an automatic way of adding to the BELQUEUE
table people whose benefits information has changed.
2. There must be some process that is constantly monitoring
the BELQUEUE table to process benefits against it when
people are added.
The second of the above two is the
easiest. Simply schedule an Enterprise Server job (right
from the Benefits Processing screen) to launch Benefits
on a frequent basis, such as every 15 minutes, processing
only queued recipients. This way, every 15 minutes,
if there are people in the queue, their records are
processed; if there is no one in the queue, Benefits
Processing just ends without doing anything.
The first of the above two is a little
more involved, but depending on your configuration,
it can still be relatively simple. If you’ve configured
your organization’s benefits to trigger most eligibility
based on benefits, HR, and payroll status values, then
your task is very easy. There are three DBOPT database
settings that you can use:
• WriteToBQ-BenStatusChg
• WriteToBQ-PRStatusChg
• WriteToBQ-HRStatusChg
Each of these can be set to either “YES”
or “NO”. If “YES”, then the
system will automatically write an entry to BELQUEUE
for individuals when their corresponding status values
are changed.
Handling other situations, such as
address changes, is a little more involved because the
rules are not as clear-cut. You might not want to process
benefits for every address change, but rather only if
the municipality changes to or from a particular area,
or if the state changes, etc. Likewise, this applies
to information such as unions and others.
So, Vista offers a couple of options.
First, user exit stored procedures can write to BELQUEUE
as per your rules. Alternately, you can force changes
through workflows that either automatically or manually
determine whether the change affects benefits, and then
only write to BELQUEUE if there is an effect.
In the 2007 PDS
UGA conference we’ll delve into all of these options
in more detail, showing you exactly how to use either
alternative.
See you in Salt
Lake City!
contributed by:
Marco Padovani
Senior Software Specialist
PDS
MPadovani@pdssoftware.com
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