Blog

By Samir Kumar, Co-Founder and President, Cloudaction

---

Any HR professional will tell you that onboarding of new hires is a resource- and cost-intensive process. A Deloitte study pegs the average cost-per-hire at more than $4000. What’s more, that number does not include hidden post-hiring costs such as paperwork and administration by HR and hiring managers, deferred productivity as new hires adapt to a new work environment, and provisioning of IT resources such as laptops, logins, and passwords.

That said, the criticality of onboarding pales in comparison to the costs of offboarding employees. An IS Decision’s study puts the offboarding challenges in stark perspective:

• 24% of companies have an employee exit security plan in place
• 36% of former employees know they can still access company systems
• 9% ex-employees admit to accessing systems of their former employers

One proven way to alleviate these issues is through process automation. And given the costs and security risks involved, automating employee onboarding and offboarding processes is no longer a choice for any business. It’s a business imperative. So, why are so many companies hesitant to apply automation to solve this business-critical problem?

In my conversations with customers, I hear three primary reasons for not automating onboarding/offboarding processes such as IT provisioning. First, they assume the technology is cost prohibitive. Second, they assume the solutions are too complex. Third, they assume they don’t have enough qualified resources to deploy the solution.

The reality, however, is that onboarding/offboarding automation doesn’t have to be costly, complex, or difficult to deploy and maintain. Integration platforms such as actionHub™ have disproved customer assumptions and changing customer mindsets.

actionHub is built entirely on the Salesforce platform and enables seamless integration for cloud-centric and hybrid enterprise application environments. actionHub’s pre-built connectors quickly integrate leading enterprise applications, and its standard REST adapter integrates with most systems without a special connector. actionHub works using simple integration rules. Each rule defines conditions (when to send data) and actions (what to do with that data). Each action defines a target (where to send) and mappings (what to send).

A recent onboarding/offboarding automation project at an energy company provides a great actionHub case study. Prior, the onboarding process was entirely manual. For every new hire, HR would send an email to IT requesting the creation of Active Directory, email, Skype, Office365, and OneDrive Provisioning accounts for that specific employee. The IT manager would then assign tasks from their Remedyforce help desk to multiple people to create the various account components. The onboarding process would take 30 minutes per new employee. Offboarding required the same manual process.

Fast forward to the present, now the company has integrated its Remedyforce help desk with SCOrch via actionHub to automate the process of onboarding and offboarding. HR uses the Remedyforce portal to create a service request for three processes:

1. New Hire – This automates the request for the employee’s AD account, Exchange account, and Office365/Skype license assignment. This also triggers an email to the new hire’s manager to complete the loop.
2. Bulk New Hires – This enables HR to submit multiple requests for account creation via a CSV file.
3. Employment Termination – This request disables the former employees AD account, hides the Exchange mailbox, and enables email forwarding.

As this case study shows (and we have done this same integration for multiple customers), onboarding/offboarding automation Is not as complex as you may think. Given the liabilities and security risks, not doing something about the problem really isn’t a viable option anymore. The good news is that with actionHub, you have a cost-effective way to simplify the deployment of onboarding/offboarding automation, all of which enables your entire organization to work smarter, more efficiently, and more productively.

To learn more about how actionHub can solve your onboarding/offboarding process challenges, contact Cloudaction today. actionHub is available on the AppExchange. Also, visit www.actionHub.io for more information.