Morningstar's Success Story:

Finding a Workday® integrated partner for a small HR team

Morningstar used Unum HR Connect to help with the stresses of billing and leave. Learn how Unum HR Connect can do the same for you.

Morningstar is a leading global investment research company that provides investment advice focused on developing a deep understanding of its clients’ goals. Since 1984, Morningstar has been leveraging their unique blend of research, data and technology to help build a secure future for investors.

More than 2,800 of Morningstar’s employees are covered by Unum benefits.

Unum benefits offered:

  • Group Life and AD&D

  • Group Long Term Disability

  • Group Short Term Disability

  • Voluntary Life and AD&D

Unum HR Connect integrations:

  • Absence

  • Billing

  • Evidence of Insurability (EOI)

Morningstar’s real-time updates

In 2017, Morningstar was having timeliness issues with updating benefit records, and the operations team was feeling frustrated. Unum HR Connect® integrations changed the game for Morningstar’s HR by eliminating the need for file feeds and manual data entry, with automation that keep all absence information up to date, secure, and compliant. Unum HR Connect also syncs data in real time, so bills are always accurate, with no time-consuming reconciliation.

The challenge

In 2017, Morningstar, a major investment company, was having timeliness issues with updating benefit records, and the operations team was feeling frustrated. Although a Unum client, Morningstar wasn’t yet Workday integrated, so they still had to handle their records manually, with just a small team to do it all. Every single record had to be tracked, reported and updated in the system. Steven Sfikas, the company’s benefits manager for the Americas, realized that a direct Workday integration could provide a solution to their problem and end the back-and-forth between their leave administrators and disability carriers. “We had some desire for finding a partner that was Workday integrated. Unum was establishing the Workday integrated capability. That was a big draw for the team.” And so the company became one of the first Unum clients to use the direct integrated process with Workday.

“We had some desire for finding a partner that was Workday integrated . . . That was a big draw for the team.

—Steven Sfikas, Benefits Manager for the Americas

Time saving for absence management

Sfikas noted that “the legacy [absence] process could take a couple hours a week . . . and there’s all of the logistical challenges associated with that as well.” In addition to establishing the process and keeping track of leaves across the organization, they had to deal with an operations team that frequently changed. That meant every new member of the team required training and education, which took effort — before automation and a more integrated process took those components out of the equation.

Now they can rely on the records in Workday, trusting that they accurately reflect the claim status for any employee. The integration does all the absence tracking so the benefits team doesn’t have to think about it, freeing them to “focus more directly on the employee” and less on administration.

Additionally, they worked with Unum this year to create better customized reporting within Workday that calculates total time absent when an employee has several concurrent leaves. This saved them from manual calculations, an improvement Sfikas felt “could be beneficial for any employer from a Workday standpoint.”

“Two things were the main drivers . . . automation and more and more state leaves. We wanted a better handle on that versus manually updating in Workday.”

—Steven Sfikas, Benefits Manager for the Americas

New billing integration for better automation

With new state leave laws popping up, billing suffered from “constant change and fluctuation.” Morningstar later added the HR Connect billing integration to automate this time-consuming process. Now adjusting to change is quick and easy.

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For more information about how Unum HR Connect works, or for questions about how Unum benefits are built for today’s modern digital workplace, please contact us.