Sandra owns benefits for a workforce that is mostly hourly, works in three shifts and speaks four languages. Open enrollment is her Super Bowl: six weeks of kiosks in break rooms, printed guides and a help line. She evaluates vendors on whether a line worker can enroll in ten minutes on a shared tablet, and she has seen polished platforms fail that test.

• Get 95 percent of employees enrolled without a paper form
• Reconcile carrier files without a month of corrections
• Answer the same twenty questions with a page, not a phone call

• Employees without email, desks or reliable phones
• Plant managers who see enrollment as lost production time
• A payroll system from 2008 that every vendor says they integrate with

• Enrollment in Spanish, Vietnamese and Somali, not just English with a translate button
• Works on a shared kiosk with a badge number, no email required
• A proven payroll integration she can call a reference about
• Carrier file errors she can fix herself

• "Our last vendor said it integrated too"
• "Who is going to stand in the break room with the tablet?"
• "What does this cost per employee at 1,400 next year?"

• Her benefits broker, who sees every vendor
• HR association conferences and the hallway conversations there
• Reference calls with HR managers at similar plants

Illustrative composite. Drawn from published HR technology research and deskless-workforce studies. Not a research persona: no benefits managers were interviewed for this profile.