Employee self-service portals

For our client, we created a single platform aggregating all relevant information and services for their employees.

cover_ai-min
Technology
React, Redux, Typescript, Node, Jenkins, Kubernetes, AWS/Azure, Docker, Strapi
Scope
Frontend, Secured Backend 4 Frontend
The client

Our client is a global grocery and general merchandise retailer. With around a million employees spread worldwide, managing their corporate persona is an essential factor.

Facing the problem
  • Employees have to look for information on multiple internal portals with an inconsistent look and feel
  • Colleague portals were using legacy APIs using different standards, such as REST, SOAP and GraphQL
  • A large part of the text and graphic content was hardcoded and needed frequent updates generating a lot of maintenance work
  • Not all information is available online, some processes rely on large printed brochures delivered to workers via traditional postal service once a year (huge waste of paper and exhaust fumes emission)
Our improvement
  • Single platform aggregating all relevant information and services for employees
  • Eliminated unnecessary printing & delivery of around 3 millions pages of paper a year, which helps the environment while reducing customer operating costs by hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
  • Colleagues have an easier time finding what they need and interact with consistent UI design
  • Parts of the application are connected to CMS which allows the business teams to rapidly deliver content updates without the involvement of our engineering team
  • Usage of monorepo and shared packages allows for good scalability – adding more apps to the platform while preserving consistent UI is easy
  • Modern JS tech stack and embracing Typescript helps us achieve performant and maintainable code

image for article: Employee self-service portals

Examples

Corporate Benefits System
App that lets the employee browse and interact with all of the benefits provided by our client – retirement plan, membership discount cards and more

Interactive Benefits Brochure
Digitized and personalized report of all the benefits and savings the employee received during the year in form of an interactive and secure app.

Technologies description

The new self-service platform consists of a set of applications living together in a lerna monorepo. The applications are built using React & Redux on the frontend and Node & Express on the backend. The entirety of the codebase is written in Typescript. The apps are deployed to AWS using Kubernetes as a container. The CMS is maintained in a separate repo and is built using Strapi (JS based open source CMS platform).

I absolutely love it, great job! Clear, easy to use and understand. And a huge plus for taking care of the environment (not unwanted paper lying around the house).
A positive feedback from an employee
Results
1.

Unifying and standardizing the product platform brought a great value for the customer and its employees.

2.

The customer has gained a set of products implemented with the same technologies on all layers which led to a drastic reduction in both operational cost and paper waste production.

3.

The employees gained a bunch of applications unified in feel and look, offering always up-to-date user-specific data.

4.

The environmental impact has been significantly reduced. Printing of brochures itself consumed approximately 220kWh of power and 13.5t of paper which led to CO₂ footprint of around 255t per year.

Scale your business with us!

"*" indicates required fields

If you click the “Send” button you agree to the privacy policy. Your personal data given in the contact form above will be processed for purposes of answering your inquiry and for any further correspondence regarding this inquiry. The controller of your personal data is VirtusLab Sp. z o.o. For more information, see our Privacy Policy