Currently an employee with 1000 eligible hours on pay status in a consecutive
12 month period as well certain percent time and appointment duration
attributes will qualify for health and welfare benefits and for UCRP
membership.
In r1548, a variation on that theme is introduced for Non-Senate Faculty (IX)
employees.  They must meet all of the other standard criteria, but only
750 eligible hours on pay status will be required of them.  There's a good
description in the Overview and Programs sections of the Detail Design
document.

Three copymembers and four programs are modified to support this
change, and two new reports will be produced to track the eligibility
status of the '750 hour' employees:

- PPP1384 - EMPLOYEES WITH 750 HOURS - ELIGIBLE FOR BENEFITS
- PPP1385 - EMPLOYEES APPROACHING 750 HOURS TOWARD BENEFITS ELIGIBILITY

These are combined in a single file with the existing corresponding
reports (PPP1382 and PPP1383) for employees with a 1000 hour
requirement, thus you will not see any extra report files transmitted
when monthly periodic maintenance is run.

There is another way in which the new criteria follow the established
pattern, in the use of system parameters.  Right now we have

- parameter 80 with a value of 1000 signifying the number of hours to
   achieve benefits eligibility
- parameter 81 with a value indicating a reporting threshold, i.e., when
   an employee is within that number or less hours of the required 1000,
   that employee will be reported on PPP1383 as approaching eligibility.

R1584 introduces a corresponding pair of system parameters:

- parameter 36 with a value of 750 (required) as the alternative number
   of hours to achieve benefits eligibility
- parameter 37 with a separate reporting threshold.  As with parameter
   81 (has values varying from 240 to 500 across our sites), this one can
   be customized to suit your preferences.  As issued in the release, it
   has a value of 240.

IMPLEMENTATION
   R1548 is date-mandated.  Per the release letter, it "must be installed
for Periodic Maintenance to begin Month 02 so that ... employees will be
enrolled in benefits for February."  That monthly periodic maintenance is
scheduled for next week, so time is short.  May we have your approval
to install when we've completed our testing which is underway?  Please
let us know if you'd like a different reporting threshold than the 240 hour
figure provided in the release.

   bvb