The Challenge
Crownrelo.com works with organizations, helping smoothly relocate their employees. They offer an employee portal to each of their clients, where employees can perform various tasks related to the relocation. Choosing the specific relocation services they want, submitting documents, payments, and important dates were all available to each employee via this portal.
However, one particular client wanted more from their employee relocation portal, and enquired Crown if they could make it happen. They required the current portal application to be upgraded with:
- A more intuitive, easy-to-use interface
- A fast and responsive portal application
- Ability to access real time status of the relocation process of each employee, with a dynamic timeline
Because this was one of Crown’s marquee clients, they were keen on getting these enhancements delivered in the most efficient manner possible. The employee portals were built on Drupal, and so Crown approached Srijan to build the new features. Srijan was already working on a Drupal audit from Crown’s Drupal sites, and readily took on the new project.
The Solution
Employee relocation is part of the diverse services that Crown offers. The portal upgradation involved adding a dynamic timeline for location tracking and further enhancements for a user-friendly interface.
Dynamic timeline for relocation involved
- Relocations points like Singapore to Hongkong or India to Australia
- Services related to each relocation like home search, shipping, immigration assistance, language training, and more
- Important document checklist related to each relocation like passport, visa, offer letter, pet vaccination, among others.
At any given moment, a user logging into her account would be able to see the status of their current relocation. A click on the service icons allowed employees to view details on that particular service like important dates, documents requested and submitted, and next steps.
Enhancements to the employee portal
The portal menu was redesigned to give the employees easy access to the most frequently used aspects - wallet, services, documents, and contacts. Some key new functionalities introduced were:
- Document upload, storage and access were enhanced. Employees could now have both private documents and notes, as well as shared documents their HR and relocation consultant. The portal could also log conversations between HR and the employee for easy reference.
- Employees could better manage financial transactions involved in the relocation process, with expense sheets to track spending, claims and reimbursements. They could also add different bank accounts to the relocation process.
- Employees can also share access to their accounts, and set up user controls to allow other stakeholders to get visibility into the relocation process, like a spouse or a partner. The ability to view multiple relocation timelines from a single account, in cases where the employee has had several relocations to different client sites.
Architecture Diagrams, Deployment Guides and other materials depending on the type of solution
The dynamic timeline functionality works as a React UI connected to a Drupal backend. The Drupal backend is responsible to make API calls to Crown’s existing Java application, and get relocation data of each user.
The React UI connects to the exposed REST endpoints at the Drupal backend to get different pieces of relocation information, like relocation data per relocation ID, services per relocation ID etc, to display to the user.
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Request/Response cycle - Drupal perspective
Request/Response cycle - React perspective
Business Benefits
- Responsive and intuitive solution for better tracking of relocation services by the end-user.
- Successful work on this project enabled Crown to onboard the client onto the new portal that met their requirements and consolidates their account.
- The new portal and the dynamic timeline are key solution enhancements that will eventually enable Crown to offer more value to their customers.
