I’ve been focusing a fair bit on financial business processes lately, and thought it was time to give human resources their fair due.  One of the simplest but perhaps most important workflows that HR can have is managing absences by employees. 

The business rules across all of our clients tend to be very similar:

• An employee submits a time off form on SharePoint (developed in InfoPath and converted to a web form).  The form has dropdowns for the type of time taken (vacation, personal, illness, jury duty, etc.), the from/to dates, number of days taken, and comments.
• Their manager (automatically assigned based on their login id) approves or rejects the request.  The form presents to the manager how many days remaining of the class of time off they have (looked up in the HR system).
• If approved the request goes onto HR for approval (really a double check, some of our clients don’t do this).
• The form is deposited in a repository on SharePoint tagged by the employee id for future use, along with the approval history.
• The days are automatically deducted from the HR system through SQL calls.

While this type of workflow works well, more and more clients are considering getting away from a separate HR system and doing everything inside of SharePoint.  Duplication of effort, storing of documents in different places, and the additional cost of the HR system are not justified.  SharePoint, along with HR business processes expressed in workflow (like Time Off, Hire/Fire, Corrective Action, etc.), provides everything necessary for running HR inside of a company.