Employee Vacations for Sales Automation

Employees vacation overlapping
Employee leaves dashboard

What is it?

The solution is to enhance the capabilities of Pega Sales Automation (SA) and make another step toward the continuity and sustainability of company's processes.

Inspiration

Many customers ask themselves:

What to do if a break is needed and how to track employees’ vacation?
How can a manager find and approve their employee's vacation through the system?
How can other employees know that their colleague is on vacation, and who is replacing him?
How to ensure the continuity of the processes of the company even though one of the process executors is temporarily absent?

We are working to extend the capabilities of Sales Automation and provide the features that many customers need. And that’s precisely the idea of our solution, to make the most important sales processes function continuously and unceasingly, while a vacation approval process becomes transparent and predictable for all participants.

Our solution is designed to fill in the gap in vacation tracking processes, for either paid or unpaid leaves. To tackle this issue, we use Pegа platform capabilities while designing the process and implementing the solution.

What it does

Employee Vacations application fully describes the life cycle of vacation request for employees:

Filling out a leave request
Approval by an employee’s line manager, supporting two channels - Pega Web Interface (portal) and email.
Back office tasks to register employee’s vacation (paperwork)

With additional features:

Add information about the employee’s replacement person for task re-routing. This is exactly the kind of functionality that Pega Sales Automation users often ask for.
Add optional stakeholders (non-linear managers, team members, etc). They will be notified of the employee’s absence.
Vacation overlaps review. Useful view for stakeholders to see who is also going on vacation during the requested period.

As a result, the process of leaving on vacation becomes transparent for all participants, and the information about the absence periods of employees and their replacements appears in the system. Therefore, all tasks assigned to an employee on vacation during his absence will automatically be redirected to his replacement, so there are no blocks in the company’s processes.

Please check our video to see the full example of processing for Employee Vacations life cycle.

How we built it

We use App Studio for most processes and Dev Studio for complex solutions to build our extension for Pega SA.

What we learned

Changes are difficult, but it's worth it

Sometimes there are a lot of pending changes, like updating legacy rules or data. We should regularly review our solution and transpose its architecture to comply with modern principles and practices.

Build to enhance

We use App Studio to create Cases and flow processes, and that's why we are not frightened by future updates. From a high-level design view, it is also convenient to build application parts as interfaces and modules.

Document as you go

This simple design principle is useful for project maintenance and knowledge transfer.

What's next for Employee Vacations for Sales Automation

We plan to extend our Employee Vacations application to build an Employee Portal ecosystem. This solution will contain many automations of employee-employer processes. Currently, we are working on Employee Profiles and Employee Skills Development Plans to have a solid solution for Employee relationship management.