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  Enwisen Helps W.L. Gore & Associates Achieve 100% Paperless Enrollment By Integrating “Content-in-Context” Communications and Decision Support with PeopleSoft Self-Service  
  Plans to Deploy Enwisen AnswerSource Knowledge Center Suite to Create a World-Class Employee Portal  
     
  NOVATO, CA (June 28, 2006) — Enwisen, the leading vendor of on-demand HR Communications solutions, announced today that W.L. Gore & Associates, the innovative company that brought products such as ELIXIR® guitar strings and GORE-TEX® fabrics to the world, has successfully deployed Enwisen’s AnswerSource Knowledge Center to achieve a 100% paperless enrollment environment for their nearly 5,000 associates.  
     
  Building a World-Class Employee Self-Service Portal  
  Gore is building an Employee Portal that will allow their nearly 5,000 associates across the country to get the HR information they need when they need it. According to Sarah Emerson, the project leader on the Compensation and Benefits Team, “We want our associates to be able to help themselves. Anytime. From work or home – in such a way that it would also free HR to do more strategic work, and not drain limited HRIS resources.“  
  The main goals of the initiative, according to Emerson, are to:  
 
Provide 24x7 employee self-service for employees as well as their dependents and spouses.  
 
Ensure consistent answers to questions across the workforce.  
 
Provide tools that help employees make decisions on the broad range of HR services.  
 
  The Solution: PeopleSoft Integrated with Enwisen’s AnswerSource
  To achieve this goal, Gore is integrating Enwisen’s AnswerSource Knowledge Center with their PeopleSoft HCM self-service applications.
  Emerson explained, “We are very pleased with our PeopleSoft self-service applications. But we realized upon deployment that to meet our goal of 100% employee self-service, just providing transactions would not be enough. We’d also have to integrate personalized content and decision support that was ‘on demand’ within the transactional environment."
  “Upon evaluating Enwisen’s AnswerSource Knowledge Center, we realized it was just what we needed to get our HR portal strategy off the ground.”
  According to Emerson, AnswerSource was selected due to its:
 
High feature-to-price value.
 
Rapid deployment.
 
History of customer success.
 
Integration with PeopleSoft.
 
  The First Phase: A 100% Paperless Enrollment
  As the first phase of the self-service initiative, Gore deployed AnswerSource Benefits Communications and Decision Support – integrated with PeopleSoft eBenefits – in time for their Fall Open Enrollment.
  “We wanted all of our associates to be able to re-educate themselves on their plans, assess their current needs and have the ability to determine if a different plan option made more sense at this time in their lives,” Emerson said.
  “Having these solutions up and running in time was critical because we were not only introducing self-service, we were also changing plans in many locations. We needed to educate employees on the new plans – often different from location to location – as well as on the benefits enrollment self-service extranet,” she added.
  To launch both their new benefit plan options – as well as the new self-service platform – Gore held benefits fairs at 35 facilities across the U.S.
  “More than 1,100 of our associates had to elect new plans, and AnswerSource was crucial to helping them understand, evaluate and select the plans that were right for their particular situations,” explained Emerson. “It was important to us that associates didn’t just select the least expensive option, but that they had the tools to select the plans that were going to best serve their families.”
 
  The Results: “Above and Beyond Expectations”
  “There were more than 5,000 visits to the site during enrollment – about 3,400 from work and another 1,600 from home. So we were extremely pleased to meet our goal of ‘anywhere-anytime’ access. In fact, even though enrollment is over, we still see quite a lot of usage – proving it to be a valuable year-round resource for information about plans, coverage, specific situations – such as adding a dependent – and more. We also plan to promote the solution to new hires and the entire workforce year-round, so we’ll see usage continue to rise.
  “After the enrollment, our associates’ input was that AnswerSource was extremely easy to use and made it easy to find the information they were looking for as well as related forms,” Emerson said.
  “One of the most positive experiences of the project,” Emerson added, "was working with Enwisen. I was shocked at how fast and accurate our implementation was. We had a terrific project manager who was not only extremely responsive, she was also very knowledgeable. She asked the right questions, was very perceptive in understanding our needs and used our time effectively. We were able to do other work vs. spending all of our time supporting the deployment."
  “Our open enrollment went above and beyond expectations. Our goal now is to build out our entire employee portal using Enwisen’s AnswerSource Knowledge Center suite.”
 
  The Phase II Initiatives: Attract and Retain Talent
  The next phase of Gore’s AnswerSource deployment is the Total Rewards Statement and the Onboarding Tour. “Our corporate culture involves making significant investments in our associates, and we want to ensure that they have a full understanding of their total compensation – including both cash and non-cash rewards. This is important to attract and then, of course, retain the best talent. And with Enwisen’s Onboarding Tour, we can ensure that new associates are up to speed in a timely, effective manner,” Emerson said.
  Phase III will include the AnswerSource Work-Life Events and HR Policies for their associates, and HR Professional for the HR, Payroll and Benefits staff.
  “We believe in building true partnerships with our vendors, and Enwisen has proven to be a partner that shares our vision and can deliver on their promises,” Emerson concluded.
 
  About Enwisen  
  Enwisen is the leading provider of on-demand workforce communications – with content and decision support solutions for the entire “hire-to-retire” workforce life cycle. Enwisen was the first vendor to deliver HR communications tools in a “Software-as-a-Service” model – making these strategic solutions affordable for companies of all sizes and across all industries, with customers that include Yahoo!, MasterBrand, W.L. Gore, MemorialCare Medical Centers, DHL, Bio-Rad, HarperCollins, White & Case, Altera and Hitachi Data Systems. For more information, visit Enwisen on the web at www.enwisen.com  
     
  Contact:  
  Barbara Levin
Vice President, Marketing, Enwisen
blevin@enwisen.com
415-897-0728x221