The tool covers a number of benefits administration business situations including organizations seeking to use business process outsourcing for global benefits administration provision across a wide range of countries, and for benefits administration service enhancement, as well as those organizations just seeking to use business process outsourcing for benefits administration cost reduction.

Suppliers of benefits administration business process outsourcing covered by this NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) include Aon Hewitt, ADP, Benesyst, Businessolver, Capita, Ceridian, CieloStar, Empyrean, Equiniti, Fidelity, JLT, Mercer, Morneau Shepell, Mouchel, Secova, T. Rowe Price, Thomsons, Towers Watson, WageWorks, and Xerox Services.

The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment tool for Benefits Administration BPO is part of NelsonHall's "speed-to-source" initiative. The NEAT tool sits at the front-end of the vendor screening process and consists of a two-axis model: assessing vendors against their "ability to deliver immediate benefit" to buy-side organisations and their "ability to meet client future requirements".

The NEAT analyses themselves are based on a combination of vendor and client interviews. The vendors are scored against a wide range of criteria, establishing a number of scenarios, each with different weightings to represent a different business situation or client business need.

To add further value in speeding up the sourcing process .clients are able to input their own weightings and tailor the tool to their requirements. So they might say: "This set of weightings for this business need looks about right to me but I want to place more emphasis here." This enables sourcing managers to use the service as an interactive tool via the web and tailor it to meet their own specific sourcing requirements.

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