Transform Employee Engagement using MuleSoft

Employee engagement has become a frequent topic of conversation in recent years. William Kahn, defines employee engagement as: “the harnessing of organization members’ selves to their work roles; in engagement, people employ and express themselves, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances.”? An engaged employee will contribute, show dedication, enthusiasm and will go above and beyond to further the interests and reputation of the organization. According to Gallup, over 87% of employees are not engaged which causes over $7 trillion in lost productivity.?

Employee Engagement Drivers

Recently, employee experience has become a major contributing factor in levels of employee engagement. Employees need more than a good paycheck and yearly “atta-girl” to invest in their work. Today, employees are looking for career development and? ongoing conversations about growth. They want to leverage what makes them unique to make a positive impact where they work. Purpose and the need to make an impact drive employee engagement.

Often, a disengaged employee is working for the same amount of time, but is doing repetitive, monotonous work. Automating these repetitive tasks can free up employees’ time so they can focus on tasks that give them satisfaction. With the help of automation, organizations have the power to streamline tasks and improve processes so employees spend more time on creative tasks, building relationships, and upskilling. Automation can lead to improved employee satisfaction and engagement in the organization.

Automation Strategy Inclusions

Automation is no longer limited to giving employees the best experience, but its benefits are so vast that; not implementing automation can cause a direct loss of revenue for companies. To ensure automation is implemented correctly,? an API-led strategy is recommended. An automation strategy built to deliver and manage a proper foundation to your organization must include:?

1. Composability – Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC’s) and microservices are easier to access and repurpose
2. Central governance - Centrally governed platform to ensure that all application connectivity and automation is consistent.
3. Full range of automation types - Applying the same standards across automation types.
4. Omni-persona support - Business users must be empowered to execute on automation opportunities.
5. Neutrality – Assets should be open to consumption by a variety of tools.

How Can MuleSoft Help Drive Automation?

MuleSoft has built on this concept of the API as a foundational component by developing Anypoint Platform, a solution that enables the development and delivery of the API layer that describes and enriches enterprise microservices. Anypoint Platform helps establish a composable enterprise that democratizes automation and drives innovation. Additionally, Anypoint Platform can be used to implement full stack microservices, often referred to as integration microservices. Integration microservices form a connective tissue across a microservices architecture.

MuleSoft has connectors for Workday HCM, Lenel, and Salesforce that can be used to surface data using system APIs. By combining System APIs and adding business logic, Process APIs can be developed, these assets can then be reused to suit business needs. With MuleSoft, it is possible to streamline new employee provisioning and onboarding, so managers can focus on welcoming their new hire and building a relationship instead of logistical tasks. There are several templates available that serve as a foundation for setting an online sync of employees from Workday to Salesforce Users, which can easily be extended for more complex use cases.

The Future of Business is Composable

With disruption coming from every direction, organizations cannot simply adapt but need to adopt composability to thrive. Enterprise composability helps deliver innovation quickly and configure applications dynamically — reassembling capabilities from inside and outside the enterprise. A composable enterprise is a highly connected organization made with reusable software components representing a well-defined business capability also known as PBCs to solve complex business problems. PBCs can be a set of services, APIs, and event channels. The well-implemented PBCs are functionally complete to ensure autonomy (no critical external dependencies, no need for direct external access to its data). PBCs are building blocks for software solutions and experiences. Times have changed, how we interact with technology has changed and it has become imperative for businesses to adopt enterprise composability to handle disruption.?

The idea of composable business operates on four basic principles:?

1. Modularity
2. Autonomy
3. Orchestration?
4. Discovery

Using MuleSoft for Composability

We know creating connectivity between numerous HR applications and services is a common challenge among businesses as numerous scenarios call for integration. Without a comprehensive integration solution in place to synchronize and connect disparate systems and services, businesses remain disjointed - ultimately slowing down business processes, making work repetitive and contributing to employee disengagement.?

Let’s consider a scenario where a company uses Workday as its Human Capital Management (HCM) system and Work.Com(Salesforce). The need here is to integrate employee, location, and organization data from Workday to Work.com to automate employee onboarding, this is an example task that HR teams spend time on.?

Figure 1: Integrate Worday and Work.Com

Through an API-led approach, it is possible to surface data with System APIs unlocking multiple systems and instances like HCM data from Workday and Work.Com. By combining System APIs and adding business logic, Process APIs can be developed, ultimately creating a reusable API ecosystem.

API-Led Design

Figure 2: API-Led Design for Workday, Work.Com Integration

You can implement this integration on either a scheduled or ad-hoc basis.

?To synchronize delta changes on a scheduled basis you can use the scheduler connector.

WorkDay Connector

Anypoint Connector for Workday (Workday Connector) provides access to standard Workday operations. Workday provides a set of software apps for financial and human capital management, such as human resources, staffing, recruiting, and performance.

Connection Types

Connection authentication types to provide to Workday configuration.

Workday Basic Authentication Connection

Use your Workday username and password for authenticating the connection.

Figure 3: Basic Authentication for Workday

x.509 Authentication Workday API v34

Use a x.509 certificate to authenticate the connection.

Figure 4: x.509 Authentication for WorkDay

Let’s explore each of the API’s in detail to understand what they do.

Workday System API

The System API when configured properly allows you to retrieve employee, location, organization records from Workday.Figure 5: Workday system api details

Work.com Salesforce System API

This System API when configured properly allows you to obtain, create, and update the employee, location and Internal Organization Unit (IOU) objects in Salesforce.

Work.com Workday Process API

On a scheduled basis, this process API template orchestrates the migration processes, which load employee, location and organization data from Workday to Work.com, a Salesforce solution.

MuleSoft has an accelerator for work.com available here.? This accelerator has pre-built connectors, integration templates, and data mappings to help you quickly and easily unlock critical employee data from systems like Workday

The design above is composable and the individual components can be reused to solve other business problems. The system API’s help surface data, while the process API’s make orchestrating processes between different systems easy. The solution can be extended to integrate with badge applications and active directory to completely automate employee onboarding. We see composability’s strength in being API-driven because it is easy to integrate into automation frameworks. . It’s easier to combine resources to build products when those resources are modular.?

Centralized Governance

Automation often means orchestrating processes between humans, machines and digital products. Automation needs to develop independently and do that? a framework needs to be developed. Intelligent automation requires intelligent governance. Without proper governance you are increasing risk. Governance helps build trust and reliability in automation. Governance also helps boost compliance and improve experience. Utilizing unified platforms like MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, governance can be tightly streamlined and enforced at each stage of the API life cycle. Anypoint Platform is built to enforce a certain degree of governance by default. It also provides options for customers to enforce governance at the plan, design, and run phases of APIs and applications.

Anypoint API Manager for Governance

Anypoint API Manager (API Manager) is a component of Anypoint Platform that enables you to manage, govern, and secure APIs. It leverages the runtime capabilities of API Gateway and Anypoint Service Mesh, both of which enforce policies, collect and track analytics data, manage proxies, provide encryption and authentication, and manage applications.

API Manager is tightly integrated with the following tools:

• Anypoint Design Center (Design Center):? Anypoint Design Center is a development environment that enables creation of API specification and Mule flows.
• Anypoint Exchange (Exchange): Anypoint Exchange provides the benefit of being able to discover, share, and incorporate assets and resources into your applications. Anypoint Exchange helps you create API developer portals, view and test APIs, simulate data to APIs (Mocking Service), create assets, and use API Notebooks to describe and test API functions.
• Anypoint Studio (Studio):? Anypoint Studio is the development platform for implementing the API
• Anypoint Runtime Manager (Runtime Manager):? Anypoint Runtime Manager is the interface to Anypoint Platform that provides a unified view of your applications, servers, and APIs. With Runtime Manager, you can deploy, manage, and monitor your Mule applications in a sandbox, staging, or production environment from one central location, whether your apps are deployed in the cloud or on-premises.

You can use API Manager to apply policies and to add contracts, alerts, and SLA tiers to your API instance. Policies enable you to enforce regulations to help manage security, control traffic, and improve adaptability of your APIs. When applying a policy with SLA, you can set an API alert to notify you when an API request violates that policy. This brings a degree of automation in your governance.

By implementing composability and centralized governance, you can set the right foundations for your organization. These strategies will help drive faster and more effective innovations. If your organization is considering a holistic approach to automation, it all starts with a solid integration strategy, and MuleSoft is uniquely positioned to help you on your journey. Automation is a big topic. Hopefully, the focus on composability and governance will help your organization develop an effective strategy for automation.?

Author

Pooja Kamath, MuleSoft Mentor

Pooja is passionate about improving lives by applying holistic integration strategies. She has applied her learnings to transform businesses in the Travel and Transportation, Retail, and Healthcare industries. Pooja loves finding unique solutions to problems that resonate with the company culture and align with the direction they are headed.