Sue Gossett

“We do an annual retirement plan review process where we assess pain points for clients that we can alleviate,” says Sue Gossett, relationship manager with OneAmerica. “We realized that our client Merz North America was spending a lot of time manually inputting changes into their payroll system. Each time they have a change, it requires 15 or more clicks in their system. This was extremely time consuming and, frankly, a question of risk due to potential errors.”

Natalie Prudente, director, global total wellness at Merz North America, says, “Sue championed efforts at OneAmerica to work with our human resources [HR] payroll provider, UltiPro, to automate participant deferral elections and changes. We had been told again and again by UltiPro that the product we were using with them for our payroll system would not accept a file transfer for participant deferral elections and changes. Sue pushed back on them and tapped into her technical team for assistance. The project lasted several months, but eventually was completed. With its completion, we no longer have to manually make deferral elections and changes in UltiPro, a process that involved upwards of 15 clicks per participant each week. This not only saves my team a ton of time, it also eliminates the risk of manual error when hand keying numbers. This has been a huge improvement for my team.”

How did Gossett accomplish this? She says she leveraged OneAmerica’s business with other clients using UltiPro. Now, the feed goes directly from OneAmerica to the payroll provider, which Gossett says is “the best-case solution.”

Realizing how deeply Merz cares about its employees, Gossett and the rest of her team decided to broach the idea of adding automatic enrollment to the plan. “At first, there was uncertainty among the leadership,” Gossett says. “But when they saw the results, they realized how much it can positively impact retirement readiness. So we then talked them through the process of a re-enrollment. As a result of these efforts, their participation went from 84% in January 2018 to 99% today.”

—Lee Barney