Innovation in the World of Leave Management: Interview with CEO, Archie Anderson

1. First of all, Archie - please tell us a bit about yourself. What got you into the HR Space?

Originally I’m from Louisiana (Natchitoches Parish), where I received my undergraduate and graduate degrees from Northwestern State University of Louisiana.   My wife and I moved to Denver area five years ago and I have four children, ranging from 10 to 22 years of age.   We enjoy the outdoors, golf, travel and the winter sports in Colorado.

I spent most of my career leading regional and national business units for GENEX Services, Inc., targeting the workers’ compensation and disability management segments – for employers and insurance/claims organizations.  I left GENEX for a short time in the mid-2000’s to become President & CEO of a competitor (Intracorp) then left there after three years to run the Optis business in 2008.  Optis is an independent operating subsidiary of GENEX, of which I am a management shareholder.  After my return to the GENEX/Optis family of companies, we acquired the Intracorp business two years ago.

As for the HR industry, you can see from above that I’m not from the HR segment or background.  While much of my experience has been focused on providing services into the employee benefits function of HR, Optis’ development of a cloud-based leave and absence management product (LeaveXpert) is what propelled us into the broader HR workforce administration functions and segment.   

Our roots were planted in HR before our launch of LeaveXpert, though. We first entered the direct HR space when we developed a custom absence system for a long-term customer of our business intelligence and data services in the early 2000’s.  When I arrived at Optis I analyzed the broader HR leave and absence management space and found that 60-70% of organizations in the U.S. administered regulatory FMLA and State FML processes manually.  We used our custom base system and developed a new cloud-based leave management product (LeaveXpert) to target employers to help them achieve greater efficiency and accuracy in complying with regulatory leave processes.

2. For folks not familiar with Optis - what is the background and offering?

Optis is our new brand “doing business as” name, launched in 2012.   Formally, we are Options & Choices, Inc.   We have been in business for more than 25 years with the constant focus on helping organizations more efficiently “get at” and organize their various types of “people data” in order to produce meaningful business intelligence and toolsets to help them manage that information with greater efficiency.   Specifically, our experience ranges across all types of people data – employee benefits (long an short term disability, health), absence & leave, workers’ compensation, payroll, eligibility, employee service records, etc.   

We offer organizations two specific service product lines:  BI/Data services and our LeaveXpert cloud software.   Both begin and end with having highly efficient data collection and integration processes, as most organization’s various types of people data resides in multiple and disparate silos – at internal systems and with external vendor systems.

Our experience and core competency is people data mastery.  We routinely manage more than 200 inbound and outbound data integration processes on behalf of our customers and support more than 5,000 users across our cloud accessed BI output and LeaveXpert absence management tool.

A couple of brief examples include:

• We help a Fortune 100 company with unique integrated BI across their HR employee benefits environment.  We collect, aggregate and integrate their long and short-term disability data, their HRIS data, their FML/absence data and their workers’ compensation data – all from different source systems and external vendors.   They access and retrieve unique BI output at their Optis provided BI cloud application site to view their reports and analytics to gauge, monitor and track the costs and impacts of these functions.  We also create “deeper dive” analytics annually for this customer that provides a deeper trending impact study for their use in planning budgets and program offerings in these areas for their employees.
• We provide a customer reporting BI function for two large insurance/claim organizations.  We collect and aggregate various types of person and employer-centric claims data from numerous internal and external vendor system sources to create customer reporting data store that these customers use to produce claims analytic reports for their customers.  The claims data types are across disability, life, long-term care, workers’ compensation and general liability.  

Our mission is simple – we help organizations better understand their people data and manage absence easier.

3. What innovations are occurring in your space - as one would think Leaves administration is a pretty mature space.

Leave administration is mature in the sense that the Family & Medical Leave Act was enacted by Congress and signed into law twenty years ago.  However, the market is not mature from an administrative efficiency perspective.  More than 60% of firms continue to administer the federal and state leave rules and laws manually within their HR function.   The myriad of rules and the complexity of those regulations continue to develop, thus the process of administering employee leave requests under FMLA and State FML continues to become more onerous and complicated, particularly if the HR function is trying to manage it in a manual fashion.  Every one of our new LeaveXpert customers that we have been successful in winning has come from an internal, manual process environment. 

Our innovation is providing a simple, yet highly customer-configurable cloud/SaaS leave and absence management product that allows HR functions to reduce the administrative burdens involved with the leave administration process.   Unlike other offerings, our LeaveXpert product allows a free trial use for 30 days, offers data management capabilities without the support of an IT staff, and is available immediately – with no implementation time. Several broader HRIS or time/attendance products have an absence tracking functionality, but they are usually limited to just tracking an event versus a full toolset that helps employers administer, track and manage the entire absence event.  Ultimately, we seek to help organizations resolve the absence event in order to resolve their return-to-work capabilities and results.

I believe the other innovation that is in the very early stage is self-serve business intelligence.  Large companies have the resources and capital to build their own systems and tools, or buy/lease broad-based business intelligence software tools to help them aggregate and integrate various data to create good business intelligence – whatever the function.   The explosion of development of SaaS and cloud-based capabilities now allows smaller to mid-size companies to afford business intelligence capabilities that were not as affordable in the past.   Our SaaS technology platform at Optis will allow HR management the self-serve capabilities to upload their own datasets from whichever sources the data resides and produce their HR and people BI report output.  We plan to launch a broader market solution in early 2014.

4. What are some basic steps that folks should implement that drive the best ROI

In the realm of leave and absence management, specifically, I believe that HR and other executive leadership set simple goals for ROI to begin.  Establish what a workday is worth to their organization – by job classification for example.  Then measure that workday value when employees are absent, against replacement worker costs, duration of absence, do they return to work?, etc.   Too many organizations try to create complicated ROI formulaic functions.  Start simple, measure what can be measured, then learn and expand from there.

Broadly, I might be able to propose a ROI for customers in general.  However, what is most valuable is for my customer organizations to communicate to me is what they value most, what problems are they trying to understand better and solve?   We want to work with our customers to create goals they can measure, monitor and value.  

5. Does optis do anything outside the United States? If so, what does that look like?

Currently, Optis does not provide its services outside the U.S. to non-based U.S. customers.  We do collect some data from international data sources on behalf of our U.S. based customers.   As our business expands and distribution resources would allow, I am looking at the UK market, as the problems of absence management and impact to employers there have very similar characteristics to the U.S.

6. Out of respect of our Active Duty military, Vets and Reservists - what are the things that we need to be aware of to make their lives easier?

First and foremost, without becoming political or too patriotic in views, employers just need to do the right thing.   Federal leave laws do provide specific regulations governing employee leaves due to being called for active or reserve duties.  New case law has been developed, also.   Sometimes the rules may be complicated, but having a consistent and uniform management of these leave requests help an organization to be fair in the treatment of military leaves.  Of course, the employer must be able to track and manage efficiently the return to work of that employee once their full or part-time military leave is completed.  If returning from active duty, beyond the leave management process, many of those employees need “return to non-military” employment assistance.  I’ve seen some examples where employers create a transitional program or service of some kind to assist the employee successfully re-enter their workplace.

7. Lastly, anything else that you want to share?

I have had the opportunity to sell and provide products and services into various buyer and functional segments, across insurance risk management, claims, employee benefits and human resources.   HR is really no different than the risk management insurance buying functions.  They’re both challenged for resources within their organizations.  They’re expected to do more with the same or less resources in the broader economy now and forward.  I have always tried to lead my teams to create simple and easy to understand services and solutions.  Help my customer solve problems and, at least be a resource for them if we can’t help them at that particular point in time.  If we can do that, then we are successful.  People want honesty – employees, customers, buyers and sellers.  It’s a basic human process and expectation.

I am enthusiastic about helping the HR and employee benefits functions for companies to become more efficient via the products and services we provide.   It’s an exciting time for the market segments we serve.  The innovations in SaaS and cloud capabilities will allow organizations to create further efficiencies and simplify processes that have become more complicated.  And, we appreciate those organizations that have entrusted their people data processes to us.