How Kepple Healthcare Consulting Cut Ease Migration Times from a Week to an Hour
When Derek Williams joined Kepple Healthcare Consulting, his first assignment was a challenging one: figure out what to do about Ease. The Peoria, Illinois-based benefits consulting firm had run its entire book of business on Ease for years, and with the platform headed toward being sunset following its acquisition by Employee Navigator, Williams was tasked with picking a replacement, building the migration process from scratch, and bringing along a team that had never known anything else.
Today, Kepple has moved almost all its 84 groups onto Employee Navigator, including a 35-school district migration completed just ahead of a major renewal. What once took a week per group now takes about an hour. And more of their groups now have carrier integrations as well. Here’s how they got there.
About Kepple Healthcare Consulting
Kepple describes itself as a boutique-style consulting firm. It specializes in school districts, with a growing footprint in manufacturing and construction. They work primarily with small to mid-size employers, roughly 15 to 500 lives per group.
That focus has shaped a high-touch service model. Kepple handles the vast majority of adds, terms, and changes in-house rather than pushing that work back to clients’ HR teams, and its staff are almost all licensed to field benefits questions directly from employees. The firm also runs on-site enrollments with nearly every group it serves.
“We try to make it very easy for the customers,” Williams said. “We partner with them rather than just checking in once a year to present a renewal and let them take it or leave it. We’re loyal to both our carrier partners and our customers.”
The Challenge: Moving a Team Off Ease After Seven Years
Kepple had used Ease roughly seven years. When Ease moved into a maintain-only state ahead of its sunset, Williams was brought on to help determine what to do next.
He evaluated several alternatives, including Zywave and BerniePortal, before landing on Employee Navigator. What sealed his decision, Williams said, was Employee Navigator’s focus on integrations and exceptional customer support, combined with the team’s familiarity with Ease and the availability of the migration tool that helped make the transition more manageable.
Change management was key to making the migration work.
“Change management is a huge thing, and getting buy-in from the team was my number one roadblock,” Williams said. “With Ease, it was a known quantity. The team had built their entire business model and practices around its capabilities. Breaking through that was a process.”
Williams credits Employee Navigator’s design for making the learning curve manageable.
“Once you learn the general layout and the philosophy of Employee Navigator, everything else starts making sense,” he said. — Derek Williams, Data Quality Manager, Kepple Healthcare Consulting
“No one’s going to read an instruction manual, so you have to build something people can just click through or ask questions about. Employee Navigator is positioned to accommodate that.”
The Migration: From a Week to an Hour
Kepple’s migration has been deliberately incremental, timed around client renewals rather than rushed all at once. The most significant piece completed so far involved roughly 35 individual school entities that operate as one group with the carriers, but multiple individual groups in Employee Navigator. Kepple finished that migration in time for the group’s October 1 renewal.
“The migration tool was perfect enough to get us going. Had we not had it, we wouldn’t have been able to build everyone out and understand all the rules and eligibilities in time to meet that renewal.” — Derek Williams, Kepple Healthcare Consulting
Kepple now has about 68 of its 84 groups live on Employee Navigator, with the rest on track to move by year-end or early next year.
The pace has changed dramatically since Kepple’s first migration. “It took a week, because I was really hyper-aware and wanted to check everything,” Williams said. Now he can migrate a group in about an hour with some additional work needed after the migration to train and support new users.
“Now I can migrate a group in about an hour.” — Derek Williams, Kepple Healthcare Consulting
Part of that speed comes from an improved migration tool. Williams said Kepple rarely runs into groups it can’t handle anymore, thanks to continued improvements by the Employee Navigator product team. The rest of the speed improvements come from a process he built with the support of his team, combining their existing knowledge and best practices with training and workflows designed around Employee Navigator. He knows the handful of things that don’t always transfer cleanly, like age reductions, plans that split into multiple plans, or dynamic classes created automatically, and checks for them every time.
Migration has also become an opportunity to clean up old habits. “I really like being able to correct sins of the past too,” Williams said. “Many groups have developed workarounds or even shadow systems over the years because of limitations in their previous systems, or simply because that’s the way they had to make things work at the time. Migration is a great opportunity to step back and ask, ‘Are there things you’re doing today that you don’t actually need to keep doing?’ We can often simplify those processes, eliminate unnecessary workarounds, and build a cleaner setup going forward. That’s been beneficial for both the client and for us.”
Client Onboarding: 15 Minutes to a Confident HR User
Kepple pairs every migration with a high-touch training session that gets HR users up to speed with Employee Navigator, how it works, and all the ways that it can help with benefits administration.
Before that session happens, Williams audits the group himself, comparing a payroll report from Ease against one from Navigator to catch anything that didn’t come over cleanly. Then he walks the client through the platform screen by screen.
“It literally takes fifteen to thirty minutes to onboard an HR user,” Williams said. “After the short introduction to Employee Navigator call, we tell them: click around, and if you can’t figure something out in five minutes, give us a call.” Most clients call once or twice in the first week and then don’t need to again.” Williams elaborated:
“A week later, they’re [HR] calling us and saying, ‘we got it, this makes a ton of sense, it looks so easy, I love the reporting.’ It’s so much easier than Ease.” — Derek Williams, Kepple Healthcare Consulting
That confidence extends to when things go sideways. “When we have a wacky open enrollment that goes south, I can call Employee Navigator and say, ‘I am so overwhelmed right now, help me,’” Williams said. “They get out the pen and pad with me, calculate the premium, and walk me through it. That really inspires confidence that we can deliver. Our customers are willing to let us make mistakes as long as we own them and get them a solution quickly.”
Integrations: Worth the Learning Curve
Employee Navigator’s 600+ integrations are the reason Williams says he first got serious about the platform, and he says that the experience with them has been positive in most cases.
Williams says that the process is usually straightforward on Kepple’s end.
“I go to my benefits, see who the carrier is, click a couple of buttons, and Employee Navigator sends an email to the carrier. Within a day or so I’m connected with their rep, they give me a list of items to correct, I do them, they test it, and it’s active.” — Derek Williams, Kepple Healthcare Consulting
Employee Navigator’s 834 team trained Williams on a format he’d never worked with before his first connection. “It was very bumpy, but the person assigned to me checked in regularly, and he was able to loop in his contact at the carrier to verify things,” he said. “I never would have been able to do it without Employee Navigator.” Williams’s directive now is to connect every Kepple group that is able to connect, a goal he says is achievable.
Support That Feels Like a Team
Across every part of the migration, Williams points to Employee Navigator’s support team as the thing that made the rest possible. “If I have a question about something they’re always very friendly, understanding, and they’ll talk me through what steps need to be taken,” he said. “They’re always referencing the documentation, and nine times out of ten, it’s solved and I can move on to my next problem.”
That support extends beyond one-off tickets. Williams regularly attends Employee Navigator’s training webinars and he is part of True Network, a network that connects Kepple with other top brokers. He recently spoke on a True Network panel about digital migration alongside two other brokers. “I learn something new every time or at least become aware of something that’s coming down the road,” he said.
Williams is also an enthusiastic adopter of Employee Navigator’s AI support tool, which Kepple started using internally before recommending it to clients. “Nine times out of ten, it’s just giving you the exact answer you need or explaining concepts in a way that makes sense,” he said. “We felt comfortable enough that now we tell our HR partners to use it, too.” Williams also said:
They reach out and say, ‘Hey, I asked the AI tool this or that.’ It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty much perfect.” — Derek Williams, Kepple Healthcare Consulting
The Bottom Line: “Just Do It”
Asked what he’d tell a broker still on the fence about migrating, Williams didn’t hesitate: “Just do it. Click the button, and if you’re scared, you have support and Navigator will walk you through it.”
“Just do it. Click the button, and if you’re scared, you have support.” — Derek Williams, Kepple Healthcare Consulting
When Williams describes Employee Navigator to other brokers, he frames its flexibility as the platform’s biggest asset. “It’s a very flexible platform that can be as simple as managing the elections of the employee population, or it can get as broad as managing all that plus PTO. This platform could be your entire HR platform if you didn’t have one,” he said. “It’s flexible enough to meet their needs, and flexible enough for us to set groups up the way they need to be set up.”
Trust and flexibility are what keep Williams recommending Employee Navigator. “I really enjoy the transparency,” he said. “I trust that you’re fully committed to benefits. You let us shine where we can, and you let the platform do what it needs to do. You just let us have a tool that works for what we need it to work for.”
For another broker’s perspective on making the switch, see how 19:21 Consultants moved more than 100 companies from Ease to Employee Navigator without losing a single client.
