How LMB Co. Cut Manual Enrollment Work 25% with Integrations

Founded in 1982 and based in Erie, Pennsylvania, Lillis, McKibben, Bongiovanni & Co. (LMB Co.) has spent more than four decades building benefits relationships across Northwestern Pennsylvania, Western New York, and Northeastern Ohio. The agency’s clients average about 50 employees and range from small professional firms and to large industrial employers, with a book of business weighted heavily toward manufacturing.

That mix creates a wide range of enrollment challenges, from small groups enrolling a handful of people to sprawling mining sites where employees rarely touch a computer during the workday. Meeting that range of needs is where Employee Navigator’s flexibility, and especially its integrations, have made the biggest difference.

A Manufacturing-Heavy Book, and a Paper-Based Past

Before Employee Navigator, enrollment at many of LMB Co.’s manufacturing clients meant paper forms. Paper is hard enough to manage on its own; it’s even harder when the workforce enrolling in benefits isn’t comfortable online.

“A lot of the people who work in manufacturing locations aren’t using a computer day-to-day, sometimes not even their phone,” Nick Torok, LMB Co.’s HR Information Systems Analyst and Employee Navigator lead, said. Rather than expect employees to self-enroll, LMB Co.’s team goes on-site, walks employees through the enrollment flow in person, and sometimes sits with them afterward to finish in Employee Navigator, turning what used to be a stack of paper into a clean electronic record for both the employer and the agency.

Ramping Up Fast, With Help Close By

Torok was new to both Employee Navigator and the benefits industry when he joined LMB Co., and became comfortable with reporting, benefit builds, and integrations within about a month and a half by using a combination of Employee Navigator training videos, the platform’s built-in AI assistant, and Employee Navigator’s support team.

“I probably called support once a day when I first started, sometimes more. They’re really awesome.” — Nick Torok, HR Information Systems Analyst, LMB Co., about Employee Navigator’s experienced, US-based phone support team

Quantifying the Impact: Less Manual Work, Tighter Reconciliation

Employee Navigator plays a key role in helping LMB Co. save time and improve accuracy. Across the book, LMB Co. estimates Employee Navigator has cut manual enrollment and account-management work by at least 25%.

“We’re not manually typing in every person’s name onto the carrier portal when we have an integration. I’d say Employee Navigator makes our account managers at least 25% more efficient.” — Kelly Hamman, Registered Employee Benefits Consultant (REBC), LMB Co.

That same focus on organization shows up in how LMB Co. manages reconciliation. About every three months, the agency pulls an Employee Navigator report, cross-checks it against employee payroll deductions, and checks both against the carrier bill.

“Employee Navigator is the system of record, so if it matches Employee Navigator, the bill is supposed to match too. If it doesn’t, I already know whose side the problem is on: the employer’s or the carrier’s.” — Kelly Hamman, REBC, LMB Co.

Turning Integrations Into a Growth and Retention Engine

Beyond saving time, Employee Navigator has become part of how LMB Co. wins and keeps business. The agency’s producers now bring Torok into prospect meetings specifically to walk through the platform and highlight the customizable reporting, document storage, and the Total Compensation Statement on the employee homepage, which shows workers what their employer is spending on their behalf.

Across LMB Co.’s book, roughly 70% of the benefits it offers are integrated, and about 85% of groups have integrated COBRA. Torok credits Employee Navigator’s Carrier Integrations tab, which shows exactly when an employee’s file was sent to a carrier, with giving the agency confidence in its work without needing to track it all by hand.

“You can click on a specific employee’s file and see if it went over, and when. It’s one less thing we have to keep track of manually.” — Nick Torok, LMB Co.

Employee Navigator’s payroll integrations have also opened doors. Once a group’s integrations are built, Hamman said, they rarely want to unwind them.

“Once they have the integration set up, they’re comfortable. They’ve already gone through the time to set it up with you, and they don’t want to uproot that process to go to somebody else. They’re planted.” — Kelly Hamman, LMB Co.

That dynamic also shapes which carriers LMB Co. steers clients toward. Torok said Employee Navigator integrations factor into carrier recommendations, pointing to partners like Mutual of Omaha and Equitable that the agency often recommends in part because they work well on the platform. Torok described Employee Navigator overall as “like the Apple ecosystem in how it consolidates multiple needs of your clients,” from benefits and demographic reporting to PTO tracking, asset tracking, and document storage, into a single place.

Payroll Integrations Mean Fewer Gaps

LMB Co. frequently uses Employee Navigator’s payroll integrations, which the agency connects for most of its groups through ECCA, a local payroll provider, along with Paylocity, and PayLogics. Rather than pass the integration fee on to employers, LMB Co. absorbs it to set themselves apart from competitors who charge clients for Employee Navigator.

“A lot of other broker firms in our area charge for Employee Navigator. We give it away for free, and we pay the payroll integration fee too. We do this because Employee Navigator makes our lives easier and helps us keep clients compliant.” — Kelly Hamman, LMB Co.

Payroll integrations also close gaps that are easy to miss manually. When an employer adds or terminates an employee in payroll, that change flows into Employee Navigator automatically,  which means new hires get offered benefits inside their eligibility window, and terminated employees stop getting billed for coverage with high levels of accuracy.

“Paychecks speak volumes. It’s easy for HR to forget that someone termed, or that they hired someone who needs to be offered benefits within 90 days. When we’re integrated with payroll, we don’t miss those people. That’s a huge convenience for staying compliant.” — Kelly Hamman, LMB Co.

From Outsourced to In-House: Built to Scale

LMB Co. first adopted Employee Navigator roughly a decade ago, initially to manage benefits administration for one large account made up of several affiliated groups. Employee Navigator’s partnership with United Benefit Advisors (UBA) factored into that original decision as well, given how central UBA is to LMB Co.’s own business.

“We chose Employee Navigator because we could subdivide one master group into multiple groups underneath it and bill each one separately. That, and the fact that Employee Navigator has always been a strong UBA partner, were big parts of the decision.” — Kelly Hamman, LMB Co.

For several years, LMB Co. paid an outside vendor to administer its Employee Navigator platform, which limited how broadly the agency could afford to offer it. That changed recently, when the agency brought administration in-house.

“Now that we’re building everything in-house, we’ll be able to offer Employee Navigator more broadly and win more cases, because it’s a service we can give away instead of paying someone else to manage it.” — Kelly Hamman, LMB Co.

Today, LMB Co. manages roughly 55 groups on Employee Navigator ranging from as few as three employees to several hundred, including one large coal mining account with roughly 2,000 covered lives on its accident, critical illness, dental, vision, hospital indemnity, voluntary STD and life plans. They will continue to use it for most of their groups moving forward and would recommend that other brokers do the same.

“There’s a learning curve, but Employee Navigator fits a lot of different needs between HR, brokers, and carriers. We recommend it.” — Nick Torok, LMB Co.