Benefits enrollment
I just went through the benefits enrollment process. It was pretty easy. Actually, it was downright painless.
The whole process was electronic. You'd think electronic benefits enrollment would be ubiquitous these days, but that's not the case. My last company asked me to fill out -- by hand! -- photocopies of questionable quality that I'd then have to fax off to HR. Aside from being a pain, there's no error checking with paper. Mistakes are a lot easier to make.
Anyway, the link to enroll is http://hr.central.sun.com/BENEFITS/HBK_LIFE_EVENTS/CURRENT_RELEASE/.
I got a little tripped up because I didn't read the instructions on the front page. You don't use your regular Sun LDAP account, instead you need to click on the "create new user" link and set up an account specifically for the benefits page.
It's handy to read up about the plans first, which you can do within the SWAN at http://sunwebcms.central.sun.com:8001/sunweb/cda/mainAssembly/0,2685,9995_27682,00.html.
As I navigated through the options there's a table at the top that shows how much pre- and post-tax dollars your benefits cost, as well as how much Sun's paying, and what the impact to your bottom line will be. This was nice, because if I just looked at the cost of the benefits I would have turned down many of them. For example, the dental benefits cost, between "low" and "high," were significant, but bottom line-wise the difference was only four bucks.
When done, the site displayed a nice summary of benefits, which it encouraged me to print. Lepoard let's you print directly to PDF, which I prefer. Just use File->Print, then there's a PDF button with a down-arrow. Easy.
By the way, when you receive the email from HR telling you to enroll, you've got 30 days to do so. Once you start the process, though, you only have 5 to complete it.
