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Culminating Projects in Mechanical and Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing
Manufacturing Engineering Engineering

8-2016

Building an Application for the Automation of On-

boarding of an Employee
Sai Kowshik Dandavathi

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Dandavathi, Sai Kowshik, "Building an Application for the Automation of On-boarding of an Employee" (2016). Culminating Projects
in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. 58.
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Building an Application for the Automation of On-boarding of an Employee

by

Sai Kowshik Dandavathi

A Starred Paper

Presented to the Graduate Faculty of

St. Cloud State University

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree

Master of Engineering Management

August, 2016

Starred Paper Committee:

Hiral Shah, Chairperson
Ben Baliga
Balasubramanian Kasi
 2

Abstract

This project was implemented in a company is a business aligned technology

services provider with proven capabilities in software application development,

application management and systems and technology integration services and an

expert in building business value for global financial services and Fortune 500

companies. This project proposal will focus on implementation of algorithms to

automate hiring process. As this project involved collecting information about the

candidate, matching the candidate to an open position, scheduling an interview with

a hiring manager, collecting and processing the feedback upon which a hiring

decision is made, and then extending an offer to the candidate.

 3

Acknowledgments

This project would not be possible without the help and encouragement from

the professors of my committee Dr. Hiral Shah, Dr. Ben Baliga, and Prof. Balsy Kasi.

The professors really helped me in gaining knowledge in every subject that was

taken during my Master’s in Engineering Management at St. Cloud State University.

I would also like to thank Dr. Ben Baliga. The resources that were provided during

the study at St. Cloud State University were tremendous. I would also like to thank

Pegasystems for their software and literary bank which helped in simplification of the

project. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family for providing a great

support in the fulfillment of my dream study at St. Cloud State University.

 4

Table of Contents

Page

List of Figures ..................................................................................................... 6

Chapter

1. Introduction .............................................................................................. 8

Problem Statement ............................................................................ 9

Objective of the Project ...................................................................... 9

Nature and Significance of the Problem ............................................. 9

Project Questions ............................................................................... 10

Limitations of the Project .................................................................... 11

Summary ............................................................................................ 11

2. Background and Review of Literature ..................................................... 12

Introduction ........................................................................................ 12

Literature Review ............................................................................... 12

Methodology ...................................................................................... 15

Summary ............................................................................................ 16

3. Methodology ............................................................................................ 17

Introduction ........................................................................................ 17

Prologue for Creation of Application ................................................... 17

Design of Study .................................................................................. 20

Budget ................................................................................................ 38

Timeline ............................................................................................. 38
 5

Chapter Page

Summary ............................................................................................ 39

4. Data Presentation and Analysis .............................................................. 40

Introduction ........................................................................................ 40

Data Presentation .............................................................................. 40

Data Analysis ..................................................................................... 42

5. Results, Conclusion, and Recommendations .......................................... 43

Introduction ........................................................................................ 43

Results ............................................................................................... 43

Project Questions ............................................................................... 43

Conclusion ......................................................................................... 44

Recommendations ............................................................................. 45

References ......................................................................................................... 46
 6

List of Figures

Figure Page

1. Hr. services application basic details ....................................................... 21

2. Stages of application design .................................................................... 21

3. Adding specific sub groups to the stages ................................................ 22

4. Types of flow actions in application with instructions, these are

important for the basic built of application .......................................... 23

5. Implementation class of the case ............................................................ 24

6. Stage based case management of onboarding ....................................... 27

7. Stage based case management of medical plan ..................................... 28

8. List of data that is collected in medical plan ............................................ 28

9. Cost incurred after medical plan .............................................................. 29

10. Automation of costs in the application for the different medical

plan .................................................................................................... 30

11. Details collected for the list of beneficiary to successfully elect

a beneficiary to the benefits plan ....................................................... 30

12. Sample user interface for the beneficiary enrollment .............................. 31

13. Stage based case management of payroll enrollment ............................. 31

14. List of details collected in payroll direct deposit enrollment ..................... 32

15. Connector properties in the evaluation case ........................................... 33

16. Basic class hierarchy explaining the classes used for building

the application .................................................................................... 34

 7

Figure ............................................................................................................ Page

17. Rule hierarchy explaining the rules that are created for the

application .......................................................................................... 35

18. Data hierarchy explaining the data that is stored in the

application .......................................................................................... 36

19. Supporting specification types ................................................................. 36

20. Declaration of properties ......................................................................... 37

21. Project timeline ........................................................................................ 38

22. Different types of report generated by application ................................... 40

23. PAL tool readings .................................................................................... 41

24. Performance summary graph of new applications has a total

elapsed time of 5.34 sec .................................................................... 42

 8

Chapter 1: Introduction

For the past 20 years, The Company had helped people across the globe

balance the interdependency between life and technology. Today, as the industry-

defining leader of technology solutions, the company ensures 280 million consumers'

devices and appliances stay online and on the job in this fast-moving, tech-driven

world. The company help its clients retrieve the seventeenth (and perfect) picture of

your dog in that sweater, and make sure the undeliverable email is delivered. The

company has the people who know what that one button does. In addition,

sometimes what it does not do. The company has always worked as though life

depends on us; and, increasingly, it does. Technology is virtually everywhere. It

drives performance at work, powers a growing number of tasks at home, and guides

us as we move between the two.

The Company is a technology company. It ensures technology and people are

harmonious. In addition, your life is in balance. We do so across the digitally

connected globe, by speaking six languages, and by working across any device,

platform or provider. The Company is unique, and it took two of innovating, and

empathizing, to build.

This capstone project proposal focused on implementation of algorithms to

automate the on boarding process in its recruiting. As this project involved, the

candidate acceptance of the offer and it ran through the first 90 days of employment.

A new employee record had to be created, invitation for the welcome kit, the new

employee record to be created for the enablement of employee benefits plan, setting
 9

up of orientation, etc., it was tedious to manually perform all these communications

between the company and the employer. In addition, the proposal also includes the

problem statement, objective, nature, and significance of the problem.

Problem Statement

This company used Applicant tracking system to manage onboarding process.

Over time, some business processes were modified in order to fit into the Advantage

mold. A new system was developed from the scratch that had enabled them to easily

configure/ make changes on the go and efficiently address on boarding services

needs in a brisk method. In on boarding, many manual processes included extending

an onboarding form for the enrollment of the benefits to the candidate. In addition,

the existing legacy applications were unable to meet the modern day demand leading

to several issues. As this process was a repetitive one, by implementing this

company could easily process the on boarding process of its employees.

Objective of the Project

The objectives of the project were:

 Decrease turnaround time of the onboarding process by 20%.

 Reduce the cost of the overall cycle by 15%.

 Increase in the performance time by 20%.

Nature and Significance of the Problem

The present system had traditionally been thought of as a way to manage the

HR functions and employees of a business. As the technology developed and HR

functions changed, there was a need to develop software that handled the process of
 10

recruitment and hiring. Having the right recruitment software can change the way you

recruit, saved the time and money during the recruiting process, and most

importantly, ensured that you are hiring the best people.

The amount of time spent on paper based systems and administrative tasks

had caused many HR managers to look carefully at the benefits software.

In another case, the modern day web applications supported cross browser

compatible to mobiles and tablets. Our current legacy application has some

constraints when it came to this feature. Therefore, there was a need to address this

to make it user friendly.

Project Questions

The following project questions were answered after the implementation of

automation process.

1. What was the turnaround time that had been reduced in the whole

process?

2. What were the total cost savings by this automation process?

3. What was the improvement in the performance by automation process?

4. What was the best way to achieve the compatibility in different kind of

devices without reducing the performance?

5. What were the changes to be made in the project implementation to make

it a user friendly and subtle one?

 11

Limitations of the Project

This project was designed and tested with the limited test data available at the

company. The maximum potential of the project can only be found when tested with

the enormous real time data available with the end users of this project. However,

every calculation used in this project is of a great accuracy with the data available at

the time of the project.

Summary

This chapter briefly covered many aspects of this project prominently to

determine the actual problem that exists and how it affects in real time, main motive

of the project, list of questions that are going to be answered at the end of the study,

basic limitations of the project and, finally, the definition of all the terms that are used

in this project to fully understand the meaning of each term. The next chapter covers

the literature background knowledge associated with this project.

 12

Chapter 2: Background and Review of Literature

Introduction

This chapter focuses towards reviewing the literature of the problem, literature

related to the methodology that has been implemented in the process of solving the

problem and the background of Company and the issues related to it.

Literature Review

Agile software development is a gathering of software development systems

taking into account iterative and incremental development in which prerequisites and

arrangements advance through coordinated effort between self-sorting out, cross-

useful groups. It advances versatile arranging, transformative development and

conveyance, a period boxed iterative approach, and supports fast and adaptable

reaction to change. It is a structure that advances desire tight emphases all through

the development cycle (Highsmith, 2001).

Pegasystem develops, markets, licenses, and supports software, which

allows organizations to build, deploy, and change enterprise applications. It has a few

products that attention on client administration and continuous examination. They are

reliably giving superb software items in a perceptive way to the customers by meeting

the due dates. They likewise give the right devices, innovations and ability sets to

execute most far-reaching and complex undertakings with a great efficiency.

Pegasystems clients are in different divisions, for example, financial services,

insurance, healthcare, communications and media, life sciences, and government.

 13

Pegasystems Inc. was founded in 1983 by CEO and Chairman Alan Trefler, based in

Cambridge, Massachusetts (Pegasystems, n.d.).

Agile methods are advantageous over traditional software development

methods when it comes to constant customer participation, customer satisfaction with

early project delivery and approval of requirement changes at any stage of software

development life cycle. Therefore, the practice of agile methods has been increasing

in recent years. Some of the well-known agile methods that are in practice today are

Adaptive Software Development, Feature Driven Development, and Scrum, etc. A

segregation among available agile methods helped managers who need to introduce

agility into their organization by providing a thorough learning on different features

and aspects of the agile methods. By segregating different agile methods, managers

can easily choose the agile method that best suited the project requirements and

organizational characteristics. Different segregation techniques to compare agile

methods were introduced in recent years by researchers. We have compared the

agile methods Adaptive Software Development and Feature Driven Development in

order to evaluate their degree of agility and coverage degree with respect to the two

Knowledge Areas, (1) Software Requirements, and (2) Software Construction. The

result of our segregation showed that Adaptive Software Development mainly varies

from Feature Driven Development, no predefined techniques or specific practices

that were using this in Adaptive Software Development. Feature Driven Development

had some predefined techniques or customs which are to be followed during software

development. The principle of Adaptive Software Development is to focus more on

 14

results rather than steps to achieve that result. A technique which is only

implemented if it is necessary to get the best output in Adaptive Software

Development (IEEE Xplore Digital Library, 2011).

The Company initially followed Waterfall Methodology which was later

changed to Agile Methodology as agile development methodology provides

opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development

lifecycle. This was achieved through regular cadences of work, known as sprints or

iterations, at the end of which teams must present a potentially shippable product

increment. By focusing on the repetition of abbreviated work cycles as well as the

functional product they yield, agile methodology was described as “iterative” and

“incremental.” In waterfall, development team only had one chance to get each

aspect of a project right. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development—

requirements, design, etc.—were continually revisited throughout the lifecycle. When

the team had project reviews every other week, it had opportunity to steer in the

desired direction. This way the project was always under control and wastage of

energy and resources was minimized (Highsmith, 2000; Pressman, 2008; Royce,

1970).

The results of this “inspect-and-adapt” approach to development greatly

reduce both development costs and time to market. Because the team could develop

software at the same time they were gathering requirements, the phenomenon

known as “analysis paralysis” is less likely to impede a team from making progress.

And because the team’s work cycle was limited to two weeks, it gives stakeholders
 15

recurring opportunities to calibrate releases for success in the real world. Agile

development methodology helped company build the right product. Instead of

committing to market a piece of software that hasn’t even been written yet, agile

empowered team to continuously re-plan their release to optimize its value

throughout development, allowing them to be as competitive as possible in the

marketplace. Development using an agile methodology preserved a product’s critical

market relevance and ensured team’s work did not wind up on a shelf, never

released (Agile Methodology, 2008; Royce, 1970).

Methodology

Various tasks which will be executed through the Agile Methodology are:

1. Planning

 Selection.

 Infrastructure Requirements.

 Security related information and gathering.

 Service Level Agreements and its conditions.

 Setting up the orientation and benefits program.

2. Analysis

 Define time frame to the project.

 Resource planning for both Development and QA teams.

 Planning of resources of the company and employee.

3. Design

 Break down of tasks into a smaller sub tasks.

 16

 Test Scenario preparation for each sub task.

 Regression Automation.

4. Execution

 Coding.

 Unit Testing.

 Execution of Manual test scenarios.

 Generate the appropriate reports after each sub task.

 Conversion of Manual to Automation regression test tasks.

 Process review.

5. Closure

 Pilot Launch.

 Training.

 Production Launch.

 SLA Guarantee assurance.

 Review SOA strategy.

Summary

This chapter briefly covered the background and literature of the problem. It

also described the methodology used and explained different phases of the Agile

methodology.
 17

Chapter 3: Methodology

Introduction

A case had stuff associated with it. It had people assigned to work the case;

tasks to be performed; relevant documents and correspondences; a status; a history

of actions taken; and a resolution.

Prologue for Creation of Application

Creating case types and stages. The Case type’s stages started with stage-

based case design by confirming the understanding of case types and stages.

Effective Case Management required that individual contributors’ complete

assignment in an organized way so they can resolve a case adequately. These

undertakings can be seen as sections on a program, speaking to destinations to be

finished to determine the case. In its least complex shape, a case sort characterizes

the undertakings and choices expected to finish a business transaction. In this

product, a case type is a collection of Pega-related artifacts such as data elements,

UI screens, processes and sub cases, decisions and integrations used to complete

the tasks for a specific case. With no setting, nonetheless, the connections and

conditions between these goals are undetectable to both application architects and

the general end users (Pega 7, n.d.).

A “stage” is primary step in organizing the different tasks required to complete

work associated with a case.

Case management gave us a detailed view of a business transaction. It

allowed the business to see, and interact with, the business transaction the way it
 18

moves through the organization. This became especially useful when we considered

that a “case” could include not only processes, but also other cases–or, sub cases–

as well (Pega 7, n.d.).

Creating primary, alternate and resolution stages. There are three types of

stages. These are used for any given case type, they are primary path stages,

alternate stages and resolution stages.

“Primary path” stages are stages the case would pass through in a “normal

course of events” and are generally free of exceptions.

“Alternate stages” are those stages that are not part of the “normal course of

events” but must be available under certain circumstances–or exceptions to the

normal course of events.

“Resolution stage” is the third type of step in this discussion which is used to

resolve or close a case when primary and alternative steps fail. It is used to terminate

the process itself.

Both primary path stages and alternate stages can be defined as a “resolution”

stage. Classifying a stage as a “resolution stage” provides a visual indicator that a

case can be resolved, or closed, in that particular stage. This can be useful–someone

who does not know the process very well can see, and understand that is where the

case can come to a close.

A primary path stage can be configured to automatically transition to the next

primary stage when all steps in that stage are complete or, set to manually transition

to another stage by an end user or as defined in a process model. Alternate and

 19

resolution stages can only ever use a manual transition to a next stage (Pega 7,

n.d.).

Creating the application. The Onboarding course started with the

acknowledgement of an offer and carried out till the initial 90 days from the start date.

The course of action initially was to manually create the employee record before the

actual start date. After the record was initiated, an email was to be sent with the

information in the initial two days of acknowledgement of the offer.

Prior to the new employee’s start date, the hiring manager needs to request

resources for the new recruit and begin setting up the new employee’s benefit plan.

HR should begin setting up the orientation schedule as well.

The first thing to be done after the employee is onboard is to set up

Orientation. In the orientation, it was scheduled to explain the employee about the

company policies, mandatory and optional courses to be taken by the employee. In

the next step of orientation, the company has to ensure that employee has the

correct insurance coverage and is accordance with the company policies. It is the

duty of the HR department to explain about the various medical plans available with

the company and to which an employee can enroll to through the company. This

phase of orientation contains the details of various dental, vision and general

insurance options available for the employee through the company. The next phase

is to guide the employee to the payroll department and setting up the required payroll

options like setting up an account for direct deposit etc. The critical step in the

process is the employee evaluation on immediate, short term and long-term process.
 20

This process is typically completed in the first 3 months of the hiring depending on

the expectations and goals discussed with the manager/mentor. The above steps

can be done in single step assignment, multi-step process assignment or a case. In

the second iteration of defining the onboarding case type, we identified the following

steps (New Employee Onboarding: Best Practices for New Hires–Trello Blog, 2015;

Pega 7, n.d.).

 Employee Record

 Send Welcome Kit

 Setup Orientation Schedule

 Request Resources

 Benefits Enrollment

 Payroll Setup

 Evaluate Employee

Design of Study

The study covers the architecture used for the design of the project: Creating

New Application and Creating the HR Department Application.

The New Application wizard was used and provided the following information

to create an application:

• Basic application information, such as the name and description of the

application.

• Business objectives that the application must satisfy.

 21

Field Value
Application HR Department
Description The HR Dept manages Human Resources of Horizon
Corporation. Employers can use this application to
manage onboarding of an employee
Built on Application PegaRules
Application StructureImplementation Only
Organisation Horizon
Business Objective Reduce response time and automating the process

Figure 1. Hr. services application basic details. Figure explaining about the hierarchy
in which the application was developed.

Identifying Case Stages. Stage Designer was used to add the following four

primary stages to your case: Onboarding, Pre-arrival, Arrival, and Evaluation.

Figure 2 shows case stages of application divided in four stages–Onboarding,

Pre-arrival, Arrival, and Evaluation.

Figure 2. Stages of application design. Figure explaining about the preliminary stage
of developing of application.
 22

Figure 2 explains about the basic stage by case management involved in

creating the project. In this case, it explained about the stages of application design.

Adding Steps to a Case Stage. Once a case is divided into stages, the next

step is to add steps to each stage. Each step represents a specific action or item to

complete in order to process–and ultimately resolve–a case.

Figure 3 shows that each step represents a specific action or item to complete

in order to process and ultimately resolve–a case.

Figure 3. Adding specific sub groups to the stages. Figure stating the basic structure
of the application.

Figure 3 explains about the skeleton of the application after the addition of the

preliminary stages.

The approach to designing the Onboarding case type was to add the following

stages and steps:

Intake

Create Employee Record (Single Step Assignment)

 23

Send Welcome Kit (Single Step Assignment)

Pre-Arrival

Setup Orientation Schedule (Single Step Assignment)

Request Assets (Single Step Assignment – Start step upon stage entry)

Setup Enablement Plan (Single Step Assignment – Start step upon stage

entry)

Wait for New Employee Start (Multi Step Process)

Orientation

Benefits Enrollment (Subcase)

Setup Payroll (Subcase–Start step upon stage entry)

30-60-90 Evaluation

Evaluate Employee (Single Step Assignment)

Cancel Onboarding (Alternate Stage)

Cancel Onboarding (Multi Step Process)

Assignment Flow Action Instructions

Verify Employee Info Populate Employee Info Populate Employee Info from the Recruit system
Orientation Orientation Schedule Set Up Orientation for New Recruit
Request resources Resources Request Resources for New Recruit
Medical Plan Medical Plan Explain about various Medical Plans Available
Payroll Setup Payroll Set up Payroll in system
Evaluation Evaluation Evaluate the employee

Figure 4. Types of flow actions in application with instructions, these are important for
the basic built of application.

Figure 4 explains the flow actions that are involved in creation of the

application. The flow action in this application defines about the action that has to be

taken when a flow reaches a particular junction.

 24

Each case was further divided into four different sub cases to facilitate the

process simplification. Each Subcase is assigned to an Implementation class

depending on the kind of information that is being collected and stored. Therefore,

we have four different implementations classes one each for onboarding, Medical,

Payroll and Evaluation. The data that is being stored and accessed through these are

stored in data tables. This process of storing data tables in different data classes

helped in keeping the information discrete and confidential among different group in

the company. This process is done to safeguard the personal information of the

Employee as at any given point of time none of the department had all the

information about the candidate as information was only made available on a need

basis to different departments.

Figure 5. Implementation class of the case. The data is stored at various different
classes as mentioned above.

Figure 5 describes the implementation of tasks in the application. The

application is divided into various classes for the feasibility of maintenance.

Onboarding. This is the first of the four subcases in the automation of

onboarding of an employee. This subcase has three different steps. This process is

handled by the Facilities department before the employee start date.

 25

a) Employee Record: In this step, the employee details have been retrieved

from the Horizon-Data-Recruit Record Class and auto-populated into the

system with the help of unique identification number given to the New

recruit after accepting the offer.

This step contains records of Employee Personal, educational and

professional Information.

b) Set up Employee Resources: Facilities department further gathers the data

needed by the new recruit in the department and provides them as directed

by the hiring manager of the resource. The UI screen contains the following

details. Different teams like facilities, hardware, software, IT, etc.

coordinated by the facilities team provide the adequate resources required

by the employee.

c) Welcome kit: This is the final step in the subcase Onboarding where in the

facilities team emails the new recruit from within the process containing the

details of reporting date, time, manager details and contact details etc. The

typical email form is configured in the Email welcome kit task under this

step.

Our business policies indicated that the hiring manager should be notified via

email when a new employee record is created and when the assignments for

requesting the new employee’s assets and setting up the new employee’s

enablement plan were pending.

 26

We also needed to send a welcome letter, which will be mailed to all new

employees once the employee record is created. The content of the letter should

read:

Dear [employee’s full name],

Welcome to the company and the [department name] team! I am delighted you

are joining us as a [new employee’s job title]. Your role is critical in fulfilling the

mission of our department and the Company.

The [department name] team is here to support your transition so, please

know that you can call on any of us to assist you. We are looking forward to

you joining our team and your success at Company.

Sincerely,

[Manager’s name]

This process is automated depending on the type of the recruit, full time

employee and part-time. This automation is done with the help of the Flow diagram,

which is being in turn called by the flow action within the process. This flow is

customized to suit the different requirements of the new recruit. This customization

was done with the help of decision shape where the two connectors are branched

and an appropriate welcome kit is sent to the new recruit depending on the type of

the employee.
 27

Figure 6. Stage based case management of onboarding. The figure shows the
division of application in the case types.

Figure 6 explains about the first case in the application design where

employee’s personal details like educational information, professional information are

taken.

Medical plan: This is the next subtype in the automation of onboarding of an

employee process is election of the different medical plans. This stage is divided into

three different tasks depending on the nature of benefits required like, general, dental

and Vision.

Each task had two different types Basic and Premium/Advanced depending on

the deductibles. For basic plan, $250 cut whereas premium plan had no deductible.

These three different types of Medical plan as categorized into three different tasks

based on the type of organ that needed to be insured as these three types of

insurance is provided by three different third parties but they are together billed to the

company.

This Subcase has an additional process that is being coded to add family

members of the employee to cover in the medical plan as well. This step has
 28

repeating grid in the User Interface layout to facilitate the addition of any number of

qualified family members.

Figure 7. Stage based case management of medical plan. The figure explains how
each stage in medical plan is divided into different plans.

Figure 8. List of data that is collected in medical plan.

 29

Figure 8 shows the checklist to enroll successfully into the Benefits plan.

Our approach to designing the Benefits Enrollment case type was to add the

following stages and steps:

Selection

Select Medical Coverage (Single Step Assignment)

Select Dental Coverage (Single Step Assignment)

Select Vision Coverage (Single Step Assignment)

Completion

Finalize Enrollment

These plans were split into three tasks but contain a similar User Interface that

contains the following details listed in the table below.

Name Benefits Cost

Health Medical Basic Medical 20.96
Health Dental Dental Coverage 4
Health Vision Vision Coverage 5.6
Basic Group Life Group Life Insurance 3.5
Basic AD&D Basic Employee AD&D 4.2
Supplemental Group Life Supplemental Insurance 7.6
Short Term Disability STD Plans 16.73
Long Term Disability LTD Plans 5.73
Life Lock Plans Employee benefit from the Company 9
77.32

Figure 9. Cost incurred after medical plan.

Figure 9 is an example for the basic plan with various selections done in a

basic format.
 30

Figure 10. Automation of costs in the application for the different medical plan.

Figure 10 explains about the UI of the Medical plans that are selected

accordingly to the elected options.

In addition to this screen, the employee has to fill out a form indicating the

beneficiaries to which the insurance benefits have to be credited in case of any

unforeseen circumstances. The UI contains the below details.

Manage Beneficiary Details

First Name

Last Name

Date of Birth

Relationship

Figure 11. Details collected for the list of beneficiary to successfully elect a
beneficiary to the benefits plan.

Figure 11 explains about the essential details that has to be collected to add a

beneficiary. This step is mandatory to add a beneficiary of the medical liabilities.

 31

Figure 12. Sample user interface for the beneficiary enrollment.

Payroll set up. This is the next step that had been followed while developing

the application for automation of onboarding.

Figure 13. Stage based case management of payroll enrollment.

Figure 13 explains about the case based stage management of the payroll

case. This figure shows its details to be collected for payroll case to execute

successfully.
 32

This case contains three different tasks.

a) Verification of Information: This step primarily consists of the verification of

employee details that are auto populated with the help of Horizon-HRDept-

Data- Class. The employee needs to verify the information that has been

populated and proceed to next step if everything is perfect.

b) Pay Check Forms: This is the crucial step in the Payroll Setup step as this

contains the User Interface field with options of direct deposit and Check

form. The employee has to choose either of them in order to receive his

payroll. This payroll is maintained by a third party site but the information

has to be uploaded and sent to payroll department to facilitate the process.

If the employee has chosen direct deposit the User Interface contains

the following information.

Index List
Name of Bank
Routing number
Account Number
Percentage of Pay that has to deposited

Figure 14. List of details collected in payroll direct deposit enrollment.

In addition to this, the employee has been given choice of adding a maximum

of three different bank accounts, for this a repeating grid was used to facilitate the

same.

Evaluation: This is the final sub case in the automation of employee

onboarding and has a 30-60-90-day evaluation cycle.

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Employee has been evaluated on the skills like performance, interpersonal,

technical, behavioral etc. and a report has been generated for every 30 days and

sent to the manager.

Depending on the review received a flow has been created to discuss the

performance of the candidate. The Flow contains the following details.

Connector Type Likelihood Audit Note

Different Position Result 25 Candidate fits a different position within the
organization
Reject Result 30 Candidate doesn’t fit desired position
Promote Result 75 Promote candidate to different Position
Yes Result 65 Candidate meets expectation
No Result 35 Candidate doesn’t meet expectations

Figure 15. Connector properties in the evaluation case.

Figure 15 explains about the connectors that connect other assignment in the

flow. These connectors contain flow action that does the assignment in the

application

Class structure: The figure below shows the class hierarchy in the company.

The class hierarchy clearly shows the data that the application has different

subclasses for the effective handling of the case.

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Figure 16. Basic class hierarchy explaining the classes used for building the
application.

Ruleset versions: The existing application is built on the following hierarchy

with the parent PegaRULES on the top of the list to the HorizonInt 01-01 at the

bottom.

Ruleset hierarchy is designed in the way that PEGARules has the most

generic rule and it bottoms down to HorizonInt containing the more specific ones.

Generic rules can be inherited in the subsequent derivative subclasses whereas the

vice versa is not true.

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Figure 17: Rule hierarchy explaining the rules that are created for the application.

Data collection and storage: As the application was used by the limited

number of agents available in the development center, there was only a little data

when the user acceptance test was done. The data collected in the respective Data

Classes as Data tables.

The data received through Employer Data is Stored at Hori-Data-

EmployeeData

The data received through Evaluation Data is Stored at Hori-Data-

EvaluationData

The data received through MedicalPlan Data is Stored at Hori-Data-

MedicalPlanData

The data received through Payroll Data is Stored at Hori-Data-PayrollData

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Figure 18. Data hierarchy explaining the data that is stored in the application.

Figure 18 explains about data storage handled in the application. The data is

essential to be handled to make an effectively.

The data stored facilitates in the effective storage of data in the System and

can be derived easily through the DataTables.

Figure 19. Supporting specification types.

Figure 19 explains about the different types of specification types. These types

segregate the application according to its specification so it can be handled

effectively.
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Defining properties: The next phase followed while creating the application is

optimization and declaration of properties associated with the property and storing

them in Horizon-Data-RecruitData class as this class can be inherited by all the four

above data classes.

The properties declared in the data class were as follows.

Property Name Label String Type Mode

DateOfBirth Date of Birth Date Single Value
Department Department Text Single Value
Dependents Dependents text Page List
EmployeeID Employee ID Text Single Value
FullTime Full Time True/false Single Value
HireDate Hire Date Date Single Value
JobDescrption Job Description Text Single Value
JobTitle Job title Text Single Value
ManagerEmail Manager Email Text Single Value
MaritalStatus Marital Status Text Single Value
ReportingManager Reporting Manager Text Single Value
FirstName First Name Text Single Value
LastName Last Name Text Single Value
Relationship Relationship Text Single Value

Figure 20. Declaration of properties. These are essential for the basic inputs used in
application.

Sprint cycle outline.

Iteration Structure:

• Sprints will run for duration of two weeks.

• Backlog Refinement will be every Tuesday and Friday at 09:30 a.m.

• Retro and iteration planning will be every Friday at 10:30 a.m.

• Tasking will immediately follow iteration planning at 11:00 a.m.

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• A public demo will be held at the end of each sprint at 11:30 a.m. every

Wednesday.

• Stories will be considered “Done” when they have been approved by the

project owner, Business owner and an appropriate Change Management

Request was approved for staging environment.

Deployment Locations.

• All development work will be done on local developer environments and

test.

• All development work will be deployed to QA when ready for certification.

• Staging will be used for all feature/update reviews and presentation to

Stakeholders.

• No feature/update branches will go to production without project owner

review on staging.

Budget

The entire project is completed within the cost provided by the industry.

No extra costs were incurred during the development of this project.

Timeline

Activity Timeline Comments

Literature review Proposal January 2016
Planning & Requirement January 2016
Analysis
Designing & Building February 2016 – March 2016
Testing March 2016 – May 2016
Production June 2016
Final Defense presentation July 2016

Figure 21. Project timeline.

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Summary

This chapter essentially dealt with the Class Hierarchy, rule hierarchy and

Property definitions. It also dealt with the various stages followed to build the

application, data collection and storage. It also dealt with the Data classes.
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Chapter 4: Data Presentation and Analysis

Introduction

This chapter will primarily focus on data representation strategies, and data

analysis. Data representation uses a strategy of displaying the data in terms of rows

and columns. Data analysis will implement the analyzing the data for validity.

Data Presentation

Out of the box custom reports are generated by Pega to analyze performance,

quality, monitor assignments, processes, etc.

Figure 22 shows that Pega by default generates reports that can be readily

used by users which are in turn divided into several public categories like

performance, quality etc. One can easily develop custom reports that were under

private categories.

Figure 22. Different types of report generated by application.

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Below is one of the reports to show the Average duration and timelines by

Assignment Type and Action of all cases.

Performance analysis. Results below show the total performance of the

application that was out of the box tool.

Figure 23. PAL tool readings.

Figure 23 explains about the PAL readings taken during the regression

testing of the process. The figure has various fields that are being collected but most

important of these is total cpu time taken.

PAL Tool Readings analyses the performance of the application and it is

out of the box tool.

The total time elapsed by CPU here is 49.95 sec

Performance Summary of legacy application has a total elapsed time of

49.95 sec.

Performance Summary Graph of New Application

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Figure 24. Performance summary graph of new applications has a total elapsed
time of 5.34 sec.

The average of the total lapsed time 1 = 49.95 sec

The average of the total lapsed time 2 = 23.67 sec

The total elapsed time difference = 26.28 sec

Percentage of time difference = 53% (approx.)

This was because of the manual process involved with the transfer of

cases.

Data Analysis

Based on the above performance analysis time had been decreased by

almost 53% because of automation process.

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Chapter 5: Results, Conclusion, and Recommendations

Introduction

This chapter will focus on the project results that are obtained after the

implementation of the project, conclusion of the project and finally the

recommendations that are considered during the implementation of the project.

Results

Agile methodology was implemented for the automation of hiring process.

The results obtained are accurate and precisely define.

Project Questions

1. What was the turnaround time that had been reduced in the whole

process?

Manual Program: The average of the total lapsed time = 49.95 sec

Automation Program: The average of the total lapsed time = 23.67 sec

The time saved by automation process is 26.28 sec

2. What were the total cost savings by this automation process?

Cost is one of the important factors that need to be considered in any

industry. By implementing this automation, company saved a

considerable amount of cost.

Manual Program: $4,800 per month (1 hours per day (3 directors) x 20

days’ x $80 per hour).

Automation Program: $0 per month

Cost savings: $4,800 per month.

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3. What was the improvement in the performance by automation process?

The target was to increase the performance by at least 20%.

Manual Program: Total elapsed time which is used as a parameter to test

the performance = 49.95 sec.

Automation Program: Total elapsed time which is used as a parameter to

test the performance = 23.67 sec.

Improvement in performance = 53%.

4. What was the best way to achieve the compatibility in different kind of

devices without reducing the performance?

Pega 7 has Inbuilt cross browser compatibility.

5. What were the changes to be made in the project implementation to make it

a user friendly and subtle one?

Use of Pega makes the user interface dynamic which makes is user

friendly and compatible in any device.

Conclusion

The end users were satisfied by the automation of enrollment, with the kind

of reactiveness and cross browser compatibility; this has become a most successful

project the company has ever taken up. With the reduction of cost with automation,

this project found a scope to be expanded across the industry in various other

departments as well.

This study was about automating enrollment process using Agile

methodology. The company tried to accomplish automatic decision making, send

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correspondence, and improving the reports. This project was mainly implemented to

overcome the issues of time, cost, scalability, and flexibility in changing assignment

logic.

Recommendations

Despite the fact that the task was effectively actualized, a few hazy areas

required consideration. Following are a few of them:

 Any logic changes in application needed code change and maintenance.

 As it licensed product one should be very careful in planning and

implementation.
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New employee onboarding: Best practices for new hires–Trello blog. (2015).

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