Upgrading employee portals built on Drupal
Crown Relocations works with organizations of all kinds to help smoothly relocate their employees. They offer an employee portal to each of their clients, where individuals can perform various tasks related to their relocations, like choosing specific services, submitting documents and payments, etc. When one of the company’s marquee clients asked to get more from the portal than was currently possible — including an easier-to-use interface and real-time status updates and dynamic timelines for every employee — Crown knew they wanted to make these updates quickly. And because Crown’s employee portals were built on Drupal, they knew to reach out to us for help.
Expanding functionality and improving the user experience
Our team quickly got to work on the requested upgrades. We began by redesigning portal menus to give employees easier access to commonly used features, and then we set out to introduce and enhance other key functionalities:
- We expanded employees’ ability to upload, store, and access documents. Now, they could work with private documents and notes just as easily as shared documents from their HR departments and relocation consultants.
- We improved the ability to manage financial transactions involved in the relocation process by adding expense sheets to track spending, claims, and reimbursements. Employees could also now link to multiple bank accounts through their portals.
- We created the ability for employees to share access to their accounts and set up user controls to allow other stakeholders visibility into the relocation process (like spouses and partners). Plus, in cases where employees had undergone several relocations to different client sites, they could now view multiple relocation timelines from a single account.
To address the need for dynamic timelines, we included the following responsive elements:
- Relocation points — like Singapore to Hong Kong, or India to Australia.
- Services related to each relocation — like shipping, immigration assistance, language training, and more.
- A checklist for important documents — like passports, visas, offer letters, pet vaccinations, and others.
At any given moment, a user logging into her account could see the status of her current relocation. Clicking on the various service icons would allow her to view key details, including important dates, requested and submitted documents, and next steps.
(For the engineers out there, here’s how it works: The dynamic timeline functionality is built on a React UI-based frontend, which is connected to a Drupal backend. Based on the user’s query, the Drupal backend is responsible for making API calls to Crown’s existing Java application to fetch user’s relocation data. The React UI then connects to the exposed REST endpoints at the Drupal backend to retrieve different pieces of information — like relocation data per relocation ID, services per relocation ID, etc. — to display to the user.)