Oracle and Authoria Empower Employees to Make More Informed Benefits Decisions

Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ:ORCL), the world's largest enterprise software company, today announced it has teamed with Authoria, Inc., the knowledge application standard in the software industry, to integrate Authoria HR with Oracle Advanced Benefits in conjunction with the Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS).  Oracle Self Service HR, a key component of Oracle HRMS, enables employees to perform self-service transactions such as benefits open enrollment, while Authoria HR provides personalized content about benefits and HR policies to help employees make more informed decisions.

The integration of Authoria HR and Oracle HRMS helps streamline the benefits decision process within a single human resource environment.  Benefits professionals may also use the Oracle Advanced Benefits and Authoria HR content and policy access to provide intelligent assistance to employee queries.

"The Oracle Advanced Benefits and Authoria HR solution takes employees beyond self-service into self-sufficiency," said Peter Mann, vice president corporate development, Authoria.  "Enabling employees to make informed decisions significantly reduces resources and associated costs needed to engage with employees on a one-on-one basis.  Providing all of the benefits and HR policy content within a single environment results in better communication and increased employee satisfaction, while saving time for all parties involved."

Communicating benefits and HR policy information to a diverse and distributed workforce can be a daunting task, especially for large employers with multiple groups of benefit offerings, for example salaried and union populations. Diverse benefits offerings increase the number of employee questions. To produce accurate answers, HR professionals need to know which plans an employee is eligible for and which may be selected at the time of the inquiry. Numerous and changing benefits choices along with shrinking enrollment periods may make the task more difficult as employees try to understand the impacts of their choices and record those choices before the enrollment deadline.

Authoria Knowledge Applications comprehensive collection of domain-specific content allows customers to define their plan and HR policy procedures.  The organizations knowledge is stored in a common repository that streamlines the management and communication of HR and benefits content.  Using the Oracle Advanced Benefits and Authoria HR integration, organizations reap the benefits of:

• Easy and secure navigation.  Secured single sign-on to Oracle HRMS and direct navigation to and from Authoria HR without the need to provide additional user login information.
• Relevant access points.  Oracle Advanced Benefits and Oracle Self Service HR provide key enrollment integration points with Authoria HR within a single environment.
• Employee-specific context.  Dynamic and personalized content related only to the employee in question.
• More satisfied employees.  Better-informed employees make better choices when electing benefits based on summary plan description information, life event explanations and plan comparisons.

"Oracle Advanced Benefits offers end-to-end benefits enrollment processing for employees within a company," said Joel Summers, senior vice president, Global HRMS Product Development, Oracle Corp.  "The combination of Oracle Advanced Benefits and Authoria HR can greatly reduce the cost of enrollment.  Fewer resources are needed to manage employee inquiries about benefits, procedures and HR policies, thus helping reduce confusion associated with making the right choices when it comes to employees and their families welfare."

The Oracle E-Business Suite

The Oracle E-Business Suite is the industrys first integrated suite of Internet business applications that automates critical business processes, offering customers unprecedented choice and flexibility in implementing business applications.  Its open architecture and single data model allow applications to be deployed as individual modules, business flows, or as an entire integrated suite.  The Oracle E-Business Suite is offered as traditional software on CD ROMs or as outsourced services.

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Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company.  For more information about Oracle, visit our Website at www.oracle.com.

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