How Long It Really Takes to Implement a Benefits Administration Platform

“How long will this take to implement?”

It’s one of the first questions you’d ask any enterprise software vendor. And it’s the question that you’re probably most suspicious of the answer to. Every software vendor these days advertises a “lightning-fast” implementation. Sometimes they’ll even throw in the word “painless” for good measure.

But what does that really mean? Days, weeks, or months? And what causes benefits administration platform implementations to go long when they do?

We can’t speak for every vendor, but we can give you an inside look at our implementation process, including how long a benefits administration implementation could take and the top reasons implementations miss their deadlines.

The Steps to Implement a Benefits Administration Platform

Take the following with a grain of salt because we can only speak for our implementation process. We break the Zevo Benefits implementation into the following four phases:

• Prework
• Building the “shell”
• Migration
• Configuration and QA

Prework

Yes, there is a bit of prework on your part. We promise it won’t require much effort, though. And the extra effort you put in here can shave off a significant amount of the upfront work we’d need to do before building your benefits offering on our platform.

We start every implementation with intake and kickoff. We’ll first request the data needed to set up your benefits on Zevo. This includes things like plan summaries, previous elections, and dependent information.

Next, we'll review your implementation timeline and dive deep into your benefits, including custom eligibility rules and fields. This information will serve as the foundation as we scaffold everything out for you in the next phase.

Building The “Shell”

Once we have all your necessary plan and employee information, we can build the skeleton of your benefits on our platform.

We break this process into two chunks.

In the first phase, we set up your custom eligibility rules, plan rates, and configure your employee portal to match your employer brand. For the employee portal, you can customize nearly everything from colors and logos down to the exact copy you use as employees work through open enrollment.

In the second phase, we’ll connect Zevo to your HRIS and upload dependent and election data. For example, if you use BambooHR (which we partner with), we’ll set up the integration between BambooHR and Zevo so your systems talk to each other and transfer data correctly. This brings us to the next, and critical, step: migration.

Migration

Once the shell exists, we'll initialize the data: employee demographic data, dependent demographic data, election data (what people are currently covered on), and beneficiaries (e.g., on life policies). Calling back to the “prework” above, if you can come prepared with your data in an exportable format, it can speed up the migration and fact-checking process in our system.

Assuming all goes well, this should be fairly quick and give us real data to demo and test in the next step.

Configure and QA

We’re nearly there: QA and go live.

We demo the platform for you and QA every step and function to ensure that everything works properly before you go live. When you’re ready to flip the switch, we’re there to ensure a smooth transition and answer all of your team’s questions.

Simple, right? Then why do some benefits administration platform implementations take 90 days or more?

How Long Does a Benefits Administration Implementation Take?

Here’s the question that’s probably racing through your head: All that sounds great, but how long will it take?

Implementing benefits administration software isn’t exactly like setting up a CRM. An implementation could be broken down into 4 or 14 phases; it doesn’t matter. What most companies care about is whether they are kicking off a 3-6 month process. Or worse, an implementation that drags on with no end.

Speaking for Zevo Benefits, we can confidently share that an implementation from kickoff to go-live can take as little as four to six weeks.

We can even condense that exact process we mapped out above to as little as two weeks. One “wild card” factor poses a risk to your implementation timeline. It’s not endless QA or hours of training; it’s setting up EDI connections.

What Causes Benefits Administration Implementations to Go Long?

Beyond platform complexity, the number one factor that can push your implementation past the advertised timeline is EDI connection setup.

EDI, Electronic Data Interchange, allows for the automated transfer of structured enrollment and eligibility data between your HR, insurance, and administration systems. It’s a critical piece of building a solid data foundation, and it’s also the top risk to a timely benefits administration implementation.

Why are EDI connections such a drag?

Employees enroll in October/November for plans effective January 1; almost everyone in the country is doing this at the same time, creating a massive backlog. Add in poor communication and people on vacation, and it can take weeks to get a response when carriers are inundated.

There’s no way to work around this, so we brute-force our way through it. We staff an in-house EDI team that follows up daily with your carrier to ensure a timely response. Your carrier may be slow to respond, but we’ll follow up relentlessly until we get an answer and unblock your implementation.

Next, we’ll share a few ways to de-risk your implementation timeline.

How to Prepare for a Benefits Administration Platform Implementation

EDI connection timelines are unpredictable, but you can shorten your implementation by showing up prepared.

We recommend coming to your kickoff with the following:

• Have your migration exportable and on hand: Export your employee, dependent, election, and beneficiary data and keep it ready. This allows us to hit the ground running when you’re ready to migrate.
• Decide on your business rules beforehand: If you can, come to your kickoff meeting with eligibility rules (how long new hires have to enroll, which events apply, etc.) documented beforehand.
• Line up carrier access and contacts: Because EDI/carrier feeds can be a drag, the best way to shorten your timeline is to map out your points of contact with contact information so our in-house team can reach out and build your connections.

There’s a theme here: organized and standardized data. The cleaner your data is, the faster we can stand up your organization on Zevo, migrate, and test your employee and election data.

How AI is Transforming Benefits Administration

When most companies talk about AI, they’re really talking about a chatbot they tacked onto the existing platform.

Chatbots can answer questions, but the hours spent during implementation aren’t exclusively used to answer basic questions. They’re spent configuring cases, verifying dependents, or building EDI connections.

AI is ripe to disrupt these tasks. So we’re building agentic AI functionality that can not only support our implementation process, but automate it as well. Upload documents to Zevo, and in minutes you could have a configured case complete with plans, eligibility rules, and structure, ready for you to review and correct.

No implementation queue or lines of code needed.

That’s the version of AI that excites us most. Workflow automation while keeping a human in the loop where it matters most. We're already able to run implementations within two weeks without AI, and by augmenting our implementation team, that time could be cut down to days, if not hours.

Right now, Zevo Benefits takes four to six weeks to implement. One day in the future, perhaps that could be four to six days.

A Smooth Implementation Starts By Partnering With the Right Platform

Your implementation experience will be dictated by the platform you choose to partner with.

Simplistic platforms may force you to adapt to them more than they can adapt to you, while large legacy platforms may carry additional complexity that can stretch your implementation timeline from weeks into months.

The right benefits administration platform isn’t the one with the most features, the best AI technology, or even the biggest logos on the homepage.

It’s the platform that silently and tirelessly works in the background; the platform that arms your team with the data you need to make better decisions; and the platform that makes open enrollment a breeze for you and your employees.

Download our guide to choosing the right benefits administration platform.

In this free guide, you will learn:

• What features to look for
• What to ask potential vendors
• How to evaluate your options
• Which vendors are best for today’s employers

Fill out the form below to get your copy.