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SAP HR Benefits
In a competitive employment market, benefits play a significant role in total compensation offers designed to attract and keep the best possible employees. The SAP Benefits (PA-BN) component offers you powerful and comprehensive tools for creating and managing tailor- made benefits packages for your employees. It allows you to administer an extensive range of benefit plans, and its sophisticated configuration options can accommodate complex plan definitions.
The Benefits application component offers comprehensive tools for administering employee benefits in an organization. It provides all the concepts and functions that are needed to manage extensive and highly individual benefits packages for the employees of an organization.
The Benefits Administration component provides the functions needed to handle the organization's benefits administration processes. It enables us to perform the following key activities:
Enrollment ?
This is a process of enrolling employees of an organization for Benefit Plans depending on their eligibility.
The Enrollment function enables us to enroll employees and, where possible, make changes to employee benefit elections as required for the following tasks:
Open enrollment ?
An open offer is the most unrestricted type of offer. It is generated by the system when you start enrollment for a date that lies within an open enrollment period. Only those plans are available in an open offer for which the employee fulfills certain eligibility criteria, as defined in Customizing.
A period of time during which an organization allows its employees to enroll in new benefits plans or change existing benefits elections.
The benefits offer set up for open enrollment is valid only during the open enrollment period. Plans available for selection during the open enrollment start on a future date, typically at the beginning of the coming year.
Default enrollment ?
A plan in which employees can be enrolled before they communicate their benefits elections to the benefits office.
Default plans are typically used for giving short-term coverage to new hires and therefore often allow little flexibility to the employee regarding the plan terms.
Automatic enrollment ?
A plan in which employees are enrolled without the requirement that they consent to the enrollment or make any elections within the plan An employee is enrolled in all relevant automatic plans at all times.
Automatic plans are often provided at no extra cost to the employee and often allow little flexibility to the employee regarding the plan terms.
Adjusted enrollment ?
A personal or organizational change experienced by an employee, as a result of which the employee is allowed to change his/her current benefit elections.
In the SAP System, the adjustment reason is a user-defined parameter to which certain adjustment permissions are assigned for different types of benefit plan. The following are examples of adjustment reasons:
Benefit Area ?
Benefit areas allow you to have separate administration of different benefit plan pools. This division is primarily for administrational purposes and would not normally be used for eligibility. This is a primary subdivision of plan set up within the benefits component.
Benefit areas are set up and function completely independently of each other.
Typically, employees will be enrolled in a benefit area that groups them according to common attributes such as country or organizational assignment.
Benefit Category ?
Benefit Category is the broadest classification of benefits. Categories are maintained by SAP. The following plan categories are provided by SAP:
These categories are predefined because the system handles each differently. In order to reflect your own requirements regarding the categorization of plans, you define plan types within these categories.
Benefit Category is the highest level in the Benefit Plan structure. Benefit Categories are again divided into Plan types. Every Category may consist of one or more Benefit Plan types
Benefit Plan Types ?
Benefit Plan types are the logical grouping of different benefit plans. Each Plan type is identified by a unique identifier, which is a maximum of four characters.
Plan types are a control mechanism for enrollment, since the system does not allow an employee to enroll in more than one benefit plan per plan type. This allows you, for example, to offer a choice of regular health care from different providers under one plan type, without the risk of accidentally enrolling an employee in more than one of these benefit plans.
Within each plan category (for example, Insurance Plans) you should define one plan type for each sort of benefit plan that the employee is likely to elect (for example, Life Insurance, Spousal Life, Supplemental Life). Thus an employee can elect a plan from the Life Insurance as well as from the Spousal Life plan type.
The following are examples of plan types for each of the plan categories:
1. Health Plans
2. Insurance Plans
3. Savings Plans
4. Stock Purchase Plans
5. Flexible Spending Accounts
6. Credit Plans
7. Miscellaneous Plans
Benefit Plans ?
The Granularity level in the Benefit Plans Structure is identified by Benefit Plans. Many Benefit plans may be grouped together under a particular plan type. The benefit Plans are also identified by a unique identifier, which is of a maximum of four characters. Ex: MEDI, DENT, VISI for Health Plans Category (MEDI Plan Type)
Benefit plans within the health plan category cover the basic health needs of an employee. A typical health plan might provide the employee with medical, dental or vision coverage.
Insurance plans provide monetary amounts of coverage payable to the employee or designated beneficiaries.
A savings plan allows an employee to accumulate capital within a company sponsored benefit plan.
A spending account provides an employee with the opportunity to establish account balances to meet anticipated spending needs during the course of the employee's benefit plan year. These needs are most often associated with health, dependent care or legal benefits.
Benefit first program grouping ?
The first program grouping is a method of grouping employees for purposes of macro eligibility. The second program grouping is a second, identical method of grouping employees into other macro eligibility groups.
The cross reference of these two groupings places every employee into a benefit program.
First program groupings are a means of identifying a group of employees who share a common set of benefits and eligibility criteria.
Example
An organization offers one set of benefit plans for hourly-paid employees and a different set for salaried employees. Hourly-paid employees may enroll in medical, dental and life insurance plans after a four-month waiting period. Salaried employees may enroll in medical, dental, life and vision plans after a one-month waiting period.
Benefit second program grouping ?
The second program grouping is a method of grouping employees for purposes of macro eligibility. The first parameter grouping is a second, identical method of grouping employees into other macro eligibility groupings.
Second program grouping is a means of subdividing your first program groupings depending upon their employment status.
Example
An organization offers one set of benefit plans for full-time employees and a different set for part-time employees. Full-time employees may enroll in medical, dental and life insurance plans after a four-month waiting period. Part-time employees may enroll in medical, dental, life and vision plans after a one-month waiting period.
Eligibility ?
The important part in the Benefits is Identifying the all the Eligible Employees for a given Benefit Plan.
This can be achieved using function module ‘HR_BEN_CHECK_MICRO_ELIGIBILITY’. This function module determines whether a person is eligible or not.
Similarly to determine the Eligibility date and the Participation date of an employee for a benefit plan we can use the function module(s) ‘HR_BEN_CALC_ELIGIBILITY_DATE’ for eligibility and ‘HR_BEN_CALC_PARTICIPATION_DATE’ for participation date.
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