Overview
When a company transitions to a new HR platform, ensuring a smooth and automated employee onboarding process is crucial. Our client was migrating to MHR’s PeopleFirst HR platform and required a tailored employee onboarding workflow that would seamlessly integrate with their existing systems.
The goal was to create an automated process that would trigger upon the creation of a new employee in PeopleFirst. This workflow needed to:
- Provision the new employee in both on-premise Active Directory and Business Centrals.
- Return to PeopleFirst after successful provisioning to invite the user to the platform.
- Ensure a real-time, event-driven approach without unnecessary system polling.
- Maintain a reliable and traceable log of all events.
The Solution
To achieve this, we implemented an event-driven architecture that reacts to system changes instead of continuously checking for updates. By leveraging Azure Queues, we ensured that each step of the workflow would trigger based on real-time events, making the process more efficient and reducing unnecessary resource usage.
How It Works (Simplified)
- Employee Added to PeopleFirst
- When a new employee is created within PeopleFirst, an event is triggered, signaling the start of the onboarding process.
- Active Directory and Business Centrals Provisioning
- The system automatically provisions the employee in both on-premise Active Directory (for internal network access) and Business Centrals (for finance and operations management).
- No manual intervention is required, reducing administrative workload and minimizing errors.
- Returning to PeopleFirst
- Once provisioning is complete, the system returns to PeopleFirst, inviting the user to access the platform and begin their employee journey.
- Event Tracking with Cosmos DB
- Every step of the process is recorded in Cosmos DB, ensuring a single source of truth and providing full traceability for compliance and auditing purposes.
Why an Event-Driven Approach?
Traditional systems often rely on polling, which means continuously checking for updates, leading to unnecessary processing and inefficiencies. Instead, our event-driven approach ensures:
- Instant reactions to changes without delays.
- Efficient resource usage, as actions are only taken when needed.
- Scalability, allowing future expansion without increasing processing overhead.
Technology Stack
Our solution was built using:
- PeopleFirst – The core HR platform managing employee data.
- Active Directory – On-premise user management and authentication.
- Business Centrals – Finance and operations management system.
- Azure Queues – Handling event-based workflow processing.
- Cosmos DB – Storing event logs and providing a source of truth.
Final Thoughts
This automated onboarding workflow not only streamlined employee integration into the company’s systems but also enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and security. By leveraging an event-driven process with Azure Queues and Cosmos DB, we created a scalable, reliable, and fully automated onboarding experience.
Looking to implement a custom workflow for your HR system? Let's talk!