Use Cases

Employee Portal Through Pulse: HR Processes in Conversation

How Pulse gives employees one conversational interface to holiday, attendance, payroll, and approvals, while Orchesty keeps identity, permissions, and process rules under control.

Employees often need something from several internal systems at once: remaining holiday allowance, worked hours, payslips, absence records, benefits, or an approval. A traditional employee portal answers that with forms, dashboards, and links into each HR system.

Pulse (Pro & Enterprise) can offer the same capabilities through conversation. People ask in plain language:

  • "How many days of holiday do I have left?"
  • "How many hours did I work last month?"
  • "Show me my overtime balance."
  • "I want to take holiday from 18 to 22 November."
  • "Who needs to approve my holiday?"
  • "Do I have any unapproved timesheets?"
  • "When was my last salary statement issued?"

Pulse sits on the HR, attendance, and payroll systems the company already runs. It is one controlled interface to the processes that already work with those systems.

One chat, several internal systems #

Employee data is usually spread across more than one application. A typical environment includes:

  • an HR system
  • an attendance system
  • payroll
  • a company calendar
  • an approval workflow
  • Active Directory or another identity provider
  • internal databases

Orchesty connects these systems and exposes selected business processes through Pulse. A request names the outcome. The topology knows which system holds the data.

A question such as "How many days of holiday do I have left?" can run a predefined topology that:

  1. identifies the signed-in employee,
  2. retrieves their holiday entitlement,
  3. checks already approved and planned absences,
  4. calculates the remaining balance,
  5. returns the result to Pulse.

The employee sees a short answer. The steps stay inside the process.

Requesting holiday through chat #

Pulse can run actions as well as answer questions. An employee may write: "I would like to take holiday from 18 to 22 November."

The employee asks in Pulse. Orchesty checks the request against internal systems, Pulse asks for confirmation, and only then is the request created, sent for approval, and confirmed by email.

The process can first gather the relevant facts and present them for confirmation:

Holiday request

  • 18–22 November
  • 5 working days
  • Remaining allowance after approval: 7 days
  • Submit request?

Only after the employee confirms does Orchesty continue. Depending on company rules, the topology can then:

  • validate the available holiday balance,
  • check whether the requested dates are working days,
  • verify company or team-specific restrictions,
  • create the absence request in the HR system,
  • start the approval process,
  • notify the manager,
  • add the absence to the calendar after approval.

The business process defines the rules and the sequence. The model selects that predefined topology. Holiday handling stays inside it.

Personal data stays personal #

An employee portal limits each person to the information they are allowed to see. Pulse works with the identity of the signed-in user, and access to processes is controlled through groups and permissions. Identity is supplied by the platform and passed into the process separately from anything the user types. See Pulse chat: identity, authorization, and execution (Pro & Enterprise).

Employee can access:

  • own holiday balance
  • own attendance
  • own overtime
  • own payslips
  • own absence requests

Team manager can additionally access:

  • holiday requests from their team
  • team availability
  • approval tasks
  • selected aggregated attendance information

HR can access broader HR processes and data according to its permissions.

The process reads data for the signed-in identity. A prompt such as "Show me the holiday balance of John Smith" stays inside the caller's own permissions. Another person's record is reached only when that caller's groups allow it.

The process decides what reaches the model #

HR systems hold sensitive records. A topology can read a full attendance history and still return only what the conversation needs:

  • total hours worked
  • overtime balance
  • missing entries
  • relevant dates

Source records stay inside the deterministic process. The topology aggregates and reshapes them before anything is returned to Pulse. The model receives that result. The underlying employee file stays in the process.

Example: hours worked #

An employee asks: "How many hours did I work in September?"

The topology can:

  1. receive the trusted employee identity,
  2. retrieve September attendance records,
  3. exclude absence types according to company rules,
  4. calculate expected working hours,
  5. calculate actual working hours,
  6. calculate the difference,
  7. return only the resulting values.

Pulse may answer:

You worked 169.5 hours in September. Your expected working time was 168 hours. Current balance: +1.5 hours.

The calculation stays in the process.

From screens to a conversational process layer #

The same pattern can cover a wider set of internal employee services:

  • holiday and absence management
  • attendance and overtime
  • payslip retrieval
  • travel requests
  • expense claims
  • equipment requests
  • onboarding
  • training records
  • benefits
  • internal approvals
  • HR documentation

Selected processes share one conversational interface. Pulse is the employee-facing layer. Orchesty connects the systems, enforces process logic, runs the actions, and controls access to enterprise data.

Why Pulse for an employee portal

Conversational access sits on controlled business processes.

Employees get a simple interface. The company keeps control over:

  1. Who can run each process.
  2. Which systems a process may reach.
  3. Which data may be retrieved.
  4. Which actions may change data.
  5. When the user must confirm before anything is written.
  6. Which information may be sent to a model.

That makes Pulse a way to expose internal company processes through a conversational employee portal, including questions and actions that change data.

Where next #