A custom HR portal? Build it in Mendix

As an employer, you want to consult all relevant employee information in one place. Almost every organization has an HR portal for this. It helps you get an overview of all HR processes and serves as the place to keep track of all your employees' data. For employees, it is in many cases a personal environment where they can handle work-related matters, such as changing personal details or requesting vacation days.

Often, an HR portal is chosen with standard functionality. As a result, it is often not possible to include your organization's specific information or processes in the solution. This frequently leads to Excel sheets or other documents in which employee information is kept alongside the HR portal. This is error-prone, and information can also accidentally end up with people in the organization who are not supposed to have access to it.

That is why at E-mergo we built our HR portal in Mendix, tailored to our needs. In this blog I list three handy features we developed for our own E-mergo HR portal. Features that may also be a valuable addition to your own HR portal.

1. Centralizing and validating your data

Employee data in an HR portal is often interdependent. Think of an employee who starts working part-time. Behind the scenes, this brings quite a few changes, because processing it involves linked calculations. All the more reason to be careful with data entry and changes. If you keep information in several places, this naturally becomes more complicated.

With Mendix you can collect information from different sources, such as various business software, in one central place. For example, we retrieve information from Exact via a (TimeXtender) data warehouse. When this information changes, the HR portal performs several validations to prevent incorrect data. Think of checks on the validity of the information and a check on whether the data can be combined in the right way.

An added benefit is that this functionality makes it easy to retrieve known data. If you add a new employee to the HR portal, for example, you can immediately view previously entered information based on an email address or employee number. This prevents duplicate entry of employee information.

Image 1: Example of the E-mergo notification overview

2. Helpful notifications and reminders

As an HR employee, you have a lot to keep track of. Think of data that changes, new or expiring contracts, but also personal milestones such as birthdays and work anniversaries.

In our HR portal we developed a helping hand for this. As soon as something changes or is about to happen, such as an employee switching departments, a contract that is about to expire or someone whose birthday is coming up, a notification is created in the HR portal. In these notifications you can specify the necessary follow-up steps, which differ per type of notification. You also select who is responsible for which type of notification. That way everyone immediately knows who picks up which task, and tasks don't linger unnecessarily long.

You can simply tick off notifications once they have been handled. This way you always keep an overview. If a task stays 'open' a bit too long, the responsible employee receives a reminder by email.

Image 2: You can 'subscribe' to a type of notification

Image 3: Employees can change their own address details

3. Employees can edit their own data

The E-mergo HR portal allows employees to manage their own (private) data, such as an address. The portal has three types of user roles: HR, managers and employees.

• The HR role is for HR staff only. They have access to all employee data.
• Managers can view a limited part of their team members' data and make certain work-related changes, such as department changes.
• Employees can only view and (selectively) edit their own information in the HR portal.

When employees make changes, the HR team also receives a notification. It clearly states who made which change. This self-service functionality makes much more possible. Employees could, for example, enter their own leave days or submit an expense claim themselves. This removes unnecessary form-filling.

The benefits of an HR portal in Mendix

A custom HR portal in Mendix helps minimize errors through data validation, prevents unnecessary duplicate data entry, improves the overview of changes and open tasks, and increases efficiency because employees can update their own data. In short, it provides powerful tools to handle HR work with ease.

Are you considering having a portal developed, or do you want to know more about the possibilities of an HR portal in Mendix? We are happy to help with advice and to think along with you about your specific situation. Get in touch with one of our account managers for an introductory meeting.

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