Benefits By Extranet

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February 16, 1998

Benefits By Extranet

Bentana software package lets companies share data with benefit-management firms

By Gregory Dalton

entana Technologies Inc. last week rolled out an extranet software package that lets a company's employees and human resources department share data with an outside firm that manages the company's employee benefits.

The suite, called BenefitsXtra, is aimed at companies that are below the radar of software vendors such as SAP and PeopleSoft and niche providers such as Healtheon Corp., a Palo Alto, Calif., startup backed by Netscape Communications co-founder Jim Clark. Healtheon aims to automate communication between health i nsurance providers and staff members at large corporations.

BenefitsXtra is a Java-based integrated suite with payroll, benefits, travel, and expense modules for companies with about 500 employees. The software lets employees enroll in benefit programs, add dependents, or make other changes, and pay premium bills electronically. Administrators can use it to transmit payroll data. The employer and the benefit-management firm both install BenefitsXtra on their local networks and use push technology so that data entered on one side is automatically reflected in the database on the other side.

"HR departments spend too much time shuffling paper around," says Mark Huber, president of PayFlex USA Inc., a benefits broker and manager in Omaha, Neb. He estimates that automating the process of updating employee data could save a couple of dollars per employee per month. Huber hopes to have 10 of his client companies hooked up to BenefitsXtra by year's end. "This is going to be a big part of our busine ss," he says.

Benefit-management firms deal with information and products from several vendors and eventually may establish live links with those vendors, such as insurance carriers, so that employees could check policy information in real time. That would require large back-end integration on the part of the benefit firm, Huber says, and for now makes sense only for companies that have more than 4,000 employees.

Bentana, in East Hartford, Conn., licenses its technology to benefit managers that want to offer it to customers under their own brand.