Core HR Applications and HR Service Portal

This is the heaviest-weighted domain. It covers how employees and HR agents actually interact with HRSD: the case lifecycle, HR services, the catalog, lifecycle events, the document/employee-file layer, and the Employee Center portal.

HR Services and HR Cases

An HR case is the central work record that an HR agent fulfills. The HR service is the configuration object that defines what a case is about — it carries the COE it belongs to, the case template, the SLA expectations, the fulfillment instructions, the knowledge it is linked to, and how the employee can request it. Think of the HR service as the catalog-and-process definition, and the HR case as the live instance of work created from it.

A single HR service can be exposed to employees in more than one way at once:

• as a record producer / catalog item in Employee Center,
• through Virtual Agent or chat,
• created directly by an agent in the Agent Workspace,
• generated automatically by a lifecycle event activity.

When you configure an HR service you choose its HR service categorization (the COE/case-type chain that determines which case table the case lands in), the case creation form (the producer the requester fills in) and the case form (what the agent sees). You can also build a child HR service so that fulfilling one service automatically spawns a related downstream case.

Case and Knowledge Management (CKM)

The HR Case and Knowledge Management application is the core fulfillment engine. It provides: case states and the case lifecycle, HR tasks (sub-units of work attached to a case), checklists, approvals, special-handling notes, case transfer/reclassification, escalation, suspend/resume, knowledge article linking, and response (templated) snippets. Knowledge in HRSD is COE-scoped, so an agent in one COE sees only the knowledge bases their criteria permit.

HR Service Catalog and Record Producers

In HRSD, employee-facing requests are surfaced through the HR service catalog. The mechanism that turns a form submission into an HR case is the record producer: a record producer presents catalog variables to the employee, then maps those answers onto fields of the target HR case record. Each HR service that is requestable has a record producer behind it. HR catalog items are organized with HR service catalog categorization so they appear in the right place in Employee Center. Editing the record producer for an HR catalog item lets you change the variables, the variable-to-field mapping, and the produced case type.

Lifecycle Events (Enterprise Onboarding and Transitions)

Lifecycle Events (LE) orchestrate multi-step employee journeys such as onboarding, offboarding, and job transfers. The building blocks:

• Lifecycle event — the overall journey (e.g., Onboarding).
• Activity set — a grouped phase of the journey (e.g., "Before Day 1," "First Week"). Activity sets can be triggered conditionally.
• Activity — an individual step. Activity types include HR tasks, to-dos, catalog/HR services, document signing, sending an email, and conditional/branching logic.
• Trigger conditions / HR criteria decide which activity sets and activities apply to a given subject (e.g., only US employees, only a given department).

You can attach an HR service to a lifecycle event so the LE produces cases, and you can use the Test Activity Sets tool to dry-run which activities would fire for a sample employee before going live. The Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) is delivered as a lifecycle event.

Employee Files, Document Templates, and Document Generation

• Document Templates generate populated documents (offer letters, confirmations) from data on the record. Template types include HTML templates and PDF (Advanced forms) templates; PDF/advanced forms support fillable fields and signature flows.
• HR document generation runs a template against a case/profile to produce a document that an agent can edit before sending.
• Employee Document Management stores employee-related documents in secure, COE-aware storage (the "employee file"), with access governed by HR security rather than open ACLs.
• E-signature is integrated via DocuSign and Adobe Acrobat Sign services.

HR Service Portal and Employee Center

Employee Center (and the unified Employee Center Pro) is the current cross-departmental employee portal that replaced the older standalone HR Service Portal. Key concepts:

• User criteria control who can see a catalog item, category, knowledge base, quick link, or portal content. User criteria match on attributes such as role, group, department, location, or company. A piece of content can have "Available for" criteria (grant) and "Not available for" criteria (deny); deny wins.
• Taxonomy / topics organize content into browsable categories on the portal.
• Employee Center surfaces the HR catalog, knowledge, Virtual Agent, requests/case status, and journey content. Personas/roles determine what each user can do in the portal.