Workflow Automation Use Cases

Benefits Administration

Challenge

Human Resources needs a way to gather feedback from employees as to what benefits or perks they would like. Once suggestions are submitted, HR needs to evaluate them before deciding whether to include them in any benefits package. HR also need to keep track of the suggestions made including the types of benefits that are approved or rejected..

Solution

• Easily design an online form that employees can complete to submit their benefit suggestions.
• Enable employees to keep track of the status of their suggestions.
• Route the suggestions to the correct stakeholders for review.
• Automatically notify employees whether their suggestions have been accepted or rejected.
• Use the resulting data to understand the trends in suggestions.

Benefits

• Centralized tracking and reporting allows HR to have a better understanding of the benefits sought by employees.
• Drives more positive engagement and morale by fostering employee engagement, contribution and ownership.
• Automation of manual processes – including the logging and processing of suggestions – drives significant ROI.
• Drives greater efficiency and a superior user experience for the HR department and business partners.
• Suggestions can be tracked and recorded, enabling the creation of a historical record of participation by employees.

Conflict of Interest

Challenge

Effectively address and resolve conflict-of-interest issues that need the ongoing attention of multiple stakeholders in the organisation.

Solution

• Easy-to-use online self-service forms allow employees to submit the details of any potential conflict of interest and maintain their disclosure status.
• Once submitted, requests are automatically routed to proper stakeholders for review.
• Correlate disclosure information with helpline-reported issues to visualize potential conflicts and prevent them from becoming issues.
• Allow ethics and compliance professionals to proactively gather information and complete due diligence to protect their organization.

Benefits

• Log conflicts in a consistent manner and track issues over time, through to resolution.
• Save valuable time and gain ethics and compliance team efficiency by removing the need for manual disclosure collections.
• Using a single database and environment brings standardization and centralization, with ready-made security and compliance.
• All stakeholders involved at the correct time and in the correct sequence.
• TAP’s powerful reporting to enables an organisation to provide evidence that their compliance programme is effective.
• Reporting dashboard and analysis features facilitates quickly uncovering high-risk behaviors, trends or problem employees, making it possible to proactively get ahead of developing COI issues.

Data Privacy

Challenge

An organisation must ensure that consent procedures by which employees agree to the retention of their personal data are in place and reviewed. Also, employees need the ability to find out what personal data is being processed, why it is being processed and where it is being held.

Solution

• Easy-to-use online self-service forms allow employees to submit any data privacy requests in a consistent manner.
• Forms can be built with embedded business logic, dropdown fields and other features.
• Once submitted, requests are automatically routed to proper stakeholders for review.
• Ability to capture rationale around the outcome of requests.
• Process transparency can be enabled, if desired, to allow greater visibility and collaboration for all parties.
• Track requests in a central database to ensure they are responded to within a timely manner and escalate to appropriate stakeholders if requests are overdue.

Benefits

• Automatic audit trail that documents every step of the process as they happen and prove compliance.
• Faster response times to requests that follow the correct process.
• Reduce data handling errors with process automation.
• Using self-service to capture employee consent (where required), provide the ability to request data changes or transfers, and any other updates helps deliver the transparency, accuracy and compliance required under the GDPR.
• Centralized tracking and reporting allows the DPO and other stakeholders to have an overview of all request statuses in real time.

Diversity Tracking

Challenge

Provide a means for organisations to ask their employees about the organisation’s diversity program. This includes soliciting the employee’s opinion on how the diversity program could be improved, what additional diversity policies are needed, what additional diversity training they would like to see, what affinity groups they would like created and other related questions. The employee responses need to be recorded, tracked and acted upon in a timely manner. Finally, the results need to be aggregated and reported to senior management.

Solution

• Easily build an online form that employees can complete and submit with their diversity program feedback.
• Completed forms are automatically routed to proper stakeholders for review, comment and approval.
• Automated notifications ensure all process participants act in a timely manner.
• Use reports and dashboards to provide results to senior management and other stakeholders.
• Full audit trail captures decisions made and actions taken at each step of the process.

Benefits

• Builds greater engagement between employees and the enterprise by allowing easy, seamless interactions.
• Automated notifications build enterprise morale and collaboration by injecting visibility into the process.
• Centralized monitoring drives real-time transparency and improved governance.

Entertainment Disclosures & Exceptions

Challenge

Provide a simple, convenient way for executives and staff to report on gifting and entertainment activities in order to mitigate potential non-compliance risk and cultivate a healthy, open culture.

Solution

• Easy-to-use online self-service forms allow employees to submit entertainment disclosures and except for review and approval by the appropriate stakeholders.
• Forms can be built in TAP with embedded business logic, dropdown fields and other features, to meet the required process.
• Workflow, including specification of stakeholders and notifications, is completely configurable.
• Once submitted, requests are automatically routed to proper stakeholders/managers for review.
• Approval or denial notifications can be automatically generated and sent to requesters.
• A secure Cloud-based archive of workflows and all documentation provides for detailed compliance/auditing.

Benefits

• Far better visibility into gift and entertainment disclosures throughout the organization.
• Much better equipped to uncover risks and rectify issues before they can escalate.
• Tracking gift and entertainment activities in a central system provides the granularity needed to easily document compliance to regulators and authorities.
• Adjustable approval/escalation thresholds speed the resolution of routine matters, and flag questionable situations for closer scrutiny.
• Automation of manual processes – including logging, processing and resolution of exceptions and disclosures – drives significant ROI.
• Reporting dashboard and analysis features make it possible to quickly uncover high-risk behaviors, trends or problem employees.

Legal/Policy Questions

Challenge

Log, preserve and address employee inquiries and legal responses around the implementation of new policies and procedures in order to facilitate audits or regulatory review.

Solution

• Easy-to-use online self-service forms allow employees to submit policy questions for review and response by the appropriate stakeholders.
• Forms can be built in TAP with embedded business logic, dropdown fields and other features, to meet the required process.
• Communicate and document policy exceptions throughout the entire organization, and support two-way legal inquiry/response threads.
• Once submitted, questions are automatically routed to proper stakeholders/managers for review.
• Notifications and alerts can be dispatched to process participants and stakeholders at pre-designated points throughout the process.
• TAP ensures that policy and legal teams can accommodate the full range of legal enquiries while shaping their policy management infrastructure to best suit their own circumstances.

Benefits

• Tracking legal questions and responses to policy updates in a central system provides the granularity needed to easily document compliance to auditors, regulators, and authorities.
• Automation of manual processes – including logging, processing and resolution of questions – drives significant ROI.
• Reporting dashboard and analysis features make it possible to quickly review exception events, and track overall exception handling processes holistically, providing a single source of truth.
• Intuitive built-in tools ensure policies and exceptions are efficiently managed and enforced, while accurately maintained, distributed, and attested to.

Policy Exceptions

Challenge

Simply and effectively track and preserve all communications and documents around policy exceptions in order to maintain compliance and avoid risk.

Solution

• Easy-to-use online self-service forms allow employees to submit policy exceptions for review and approval by the appropriate stakeholders.
• Forms can be built in TAP with embedded business logic, dropdown fields and other features, to meet the required process.
• Workflow, including specification of stakeholders and notifications, is completely configurable.
• Ensure that when appropriate, a risk assessment is carried out before the policy exception is approved.
• Track when a policy exception is due to expire and automatically follow up with the request to see if the exception still applies.
• Once submitted, requests are automatically routed to proper stakeholders/managers for review.
• Approval or denial notifications can be automatically generated and sent to requesters.

Benefits

• Far better visibility into policy exceptions across the organisation.
• Centralizing exception activities in a single system results in enhanced reporting to key stakeholders across the organisation.
• Increase visibility into policy-related risks through automated logging, process and resolution of exceptions and disclosures.
• Automation of manual processes – including logging, processing and resolution of exceptions – drives significant ROI.
• Workflow automation provides significant ROI by streamlining processes and reducing the manual labor required with typical exception processing, while also reducing the potential for costly human error.
• Reporting dashboard and analysis features make it possible to quickly uncover high-risk behaviors, trends or problem employees.

Regular Compliance Affirmation

Challenge

Enable stakeholders and policy managers to affirm that key policies and procedures are being followed and correctly implemented. What’s more, they have to make such an affirmation on a recurring basis, often yearly for these policies. Finally, these affirmations, if required, then need to be reported to the appropriate regulatory body and tracked internally for compliance purposes.

Solution

• Create a clear business workflow enabling stakeholders and policy managers to work through the required stages for providing affirmation.
• Ensure that details of an action are provided where compliance is not currently being fully met.
• Route the affirmations to the correct stakeholders for review and approval.
• Automated notifications at each stage of the process, ensuring stakeholders and involved parties are advised in real time when their input is required.
• Centrally track all affirmations to understand where there are any outstanding or delayed requests.
• Automatically remind stakeholders and policy owners when their affirmation is next due.

Benefits

• Tracking affirmations in a central system like PolicyHub provides the granularity needed to easily document compliance to regulators and authorities.
• Creating a full audit trail that documents every step of the process, who was involved and what decisions were made.
• Automating manual processes drives significant ROI and reduces errors.
• Reporting dashboard and analysis features make it possible to quickly uncover high-risk trends or exceptions.
• Easily adapt the affirmation process to changing business needs.

Third Party Due Dilligence

Challenge

Create a solution to onboard new vendors, ensuring relevant information is captured, routed, reviewed and approved by all necessary parties including legal.

Solution

• Using a self-service online portal with standardized forms, employees wishing to onboard a new vendor can be guided through the onboarding process with a minimum of errors or delays.
• The online forms can be easily configured to capture all the information needed to approve a vendor, including the capture of documents such as a W9..
• Once a request to onboard a vendor has been submitted, it’s routed to the proper stakeholders for review.
• Notifications and alerts can be sent to process participants and stakeholders at pre-designated points throughout the intake process. For instance, once legal has approved the vendor, a notification to add the vendor to the system can be automatically sent to Accounts Payable.
• Users have complete visibility into the process and can login into the system anytime to see where the onboarding request is.
• Tracking and auditing of the request and completion process is automated, allowing better governance and compliance.

Benefits

• Due diligence and onboarding requests are submitted and processed with far greater speed and with minimized errors, delays and costs.
• Centralized tracking and reporting allows managers to have an overview of all vendor onboarding requests in real time.
• Self-service forms provide a quick and standardized request intake process, eliminating errors and waste.
• Process acceleration improves stakeholder agility and responsiveness.
• Real-time oversight permits performance analysis and improvement of the entire process.
• Drives greater efficiency, accountability and a superior user experience for the stakeholders and business partners.

Whistleblower

Challenge

Companies need to provide employees a way to anonymously report activity that they suspect is fraudulent. What’s more, these companies need to ensure that any such reports are followed-up on and investigated and that these reports can be examined for trends and patterns.

Solution

• Allow employees to easily and confidently submit any potential suspicious activity.
• Cater for anonymous submissions where appropriate.
• Route the requests to the correct stakeholders for review and action.
• Full audit trail of any decisions or actions taken following the submission.
• Central repository for managing and tracking submissions.
• Establish monitoring and auditing procedures to continually assess the program’s performance.
• Where possible and where appropriate, keep employees informed on the status of investigations and outcomes.

Benefits

• Builds greater engagement between employees and the organisation by allowing easy, seamless, confidential interactions.
• Much better equipped to uncover risks and rectify issues before they can escalate.
• Using a single database and environment brings standardization and centralization, with ready-made security and compliance.
• Automatic audit trail that documents every step of the process along with decisions made and actions taken.
• Reporting dashboard and analysis features make it possible to quickly uncover high-risk behaviors, trends or problem employees.