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Solution · Other solutionsFrom a printed form to a posted absence, with coverage checked before anyone approves
Leave requested, checked and posted without an e‑mail
Employees request leave from a card in Microsoft Teams, rules check balance, notice and team coverage automatically, and a robot writes the absence to the HRIS, the calendar and the planner.
Executive summary
Leave should not be approved from memory, rekeyed twice and confirmed by asking.
The flow we build runs on what a manufacturer of this size already owns: Microsoft 365 for the interface and the identity.
Employees get a decision in hours instead of weeks and see the remaining balance the moment it changes.
SAP SuccessFactors or Workday absence records; Outlook calendars; the site planner where one is still kept
Business problem
HR self-service
Leave management breaks in the gaps between systems that each hold one part of the answer. The HRIS holds the balance. The department planner holds the team view. The team lead holds the decision. E‑mail holds it all together, badly.
Employees cannot see where a request is, so they ask, and the question becomes the status system. Managers approve without the facts, because opening the HRIS to check an entitlement is not something anyone does at the edge of a production line, so they approve too much in one week and too little in another. Administrators retype what has already been written down twice, which means balances lag behind reality and payroll picks up the difference at cut-off.
Rules make it worse. Notice periods, carry-over limits, blackout weeks around a shutdown and the minimum number of qualified people per shift are all written down somewhere and all applied from memory. Two plants apply them differently, which under a collective agreement is a grievance waiting to be filed. The process survives because nobody owns it end to end: HR owns the record, the line owns the decision, and the employee owns the waiting.
How it works today
Whatever the HRIS on the contract, this is the routine we find on most shift sites.
- PersonAn employee fills in the paper or PDF leave form and hands it to the team lead
- PersonThe team lead checks the department's Excel planner and approves against a balance he remembers
- SystemReception scans the signed form and e‑mails it to the HR mailbox
- WaitingThe form waits in the mailbox until an administrator has time, typically one to three working days
- SystemThe administrator looks up the entitlement in the HRIS, keys the absence, then updates the planner
- Risk of errorCoverage becomes visible only once the planner is updated, days after the decision was taken
- Risk of errorPayroll finds balance mismatches at cut-off, and the corrections run into the following month
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Nobody planned this work; it accumulated.
- Rekeying is the smallest line in this process and the easiest to see. The expensive part is what an approval given without facts sets in motion three weeks later.
- Uncovered shifts are paid for twice, in overtime premium and in agency hours, and neither cost is ever attributed to the leave decision that caused it.
- Balance errors do not stay inside HR. They arrive as payroll corrections, as disputes when somebody leaves, and as accrual figures the auditor asks about.
- Consistency depends on who is on duty. When one administrator carries the carry-over and blackout rules in her head, two sites apply the same agreement differently and nobody can show why.
- Peaks land exactly when the chain is slowest: volume before the summer shutdown doubles while the same four people process it.
Cost of inaction
Volume follows headcount, and the manual chain follows volume: a fourth plant brings another planner, another scanner and another administrator carrying a different reading of the same agreement. Across twelve months the team absorbs the peaks by working late in exactly the weeks when mistakes are made, and each month adds a handful of payroll corrections with an employee conversation attached to every one.
Outside the table sit the manager's three minutes per request, worth about €5,780 a month at €68 an hour, the overtime bought to cover approvals nobody checked, and the employee's own waiting. Expectations move the other way: people who book a flight on a phone in a minute do not accept two weeks of silence at work.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A manufacturing company with 1,850 employees across three plants, running shift production and a central office; SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central holds balances and Microsoft 365 is already deployed to everyone.
Around 1,700 leave requests a month reach an HR administration team of four, peaking before the summer shutdown and at year end; every department keeps its own Excel holiday planner alongside the HRIS.
Paper forms are signed on the line, scanned at reception and e‑mailed to HR, where the absence is keyed into the HRIS and then into the planner. Confirmation back to the employee is optional and often skipped.
Six minutes of administration per request, plus three minutes of a manager's time spent finding a balance and a planner before deciding; payroll corrections for wrong balances are a monthly fixture rather than an incident.
The request is made from a card in Microsoft Teams, rules check balance, notice, carry-over, blackout weeks and minimum coverage, the manager approves with any conflict in front of him, and a robot posts the absence once, in the system of record.
In the modelled case administration falls to the exception share, decisions move from weeks to hours, and coverage conflicts appear before the approval rather than on the morning of the shift. The figures are a model, not a measurement.
Proposed solution
The flow we build runs on what a manufacturer of this size already owns: Microsoft 365 for the interface and the identity, and the UiPath Platform for the rules, the writing and the audit trail. An employee opens a card in Microsoft Teams, on a desk client or on a phone in the changing room, and sees the entitlement the HRIS currently holds rather than a figure copied into a planner. Dates are picked, an absence type is chosen, and the request leaves.
The rule check happens before anyone is asked to decide. A robot reads the balance and the accrual position, applies the notice period and the carry-over rule for that site, checks the blackout weeks around the shutdown, and counts how many people with the required qualification are already booked off in the same team in the same week. The schedule comes from Microsoft Teams Shifts where a site uses it and from the department planner where it does not. The manager then receives one card with the answer already on it: the balance after this request, who else is away, and any rule the request breaks.
Approval is a tap. The robot writes once, into the HRIS, and follows it with the Outlook calendar entry, the planner update where a planner still exists, and the confirmation the employee never used to get. Requests that break a rule do not vanish into a mailbox: they become a task in UiPath Action Center for HR with the rule result attached, and they can be released with a reason that is stored beside the record. Operations gets an absence and coverage view in Power BI that is current, because the flow that posts the absence is the flow that updates it.
Microsoft Teams Adaptive Cards and the Approvals app; Microsoft Teams Shifts as a schedule source; Outlook calendar entries; UiPath Action Center actionable notifications inside Microsoft Teams; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit log
The request and approval cards, the site rule catalogue covering balance, notice, carry-over, blackout weeks and minimum coverage, the posting robot with delegation logic, the exception route to HR, and the Power BI absence and coverage model
Entitlement reads and absence writes to SAP SuccessFactors through SAP OData or to Workday through the UiPath Integration Service connector; the department planner where a site keeps one outside the HRIS
How the automated process works
- PersonAn employee opens the leave card in Microsoft Teams and picks dates against the balance the card shows
- AutomationA robot reads entitlement, accrual and booked absences from the HRIS and the team schedule
- AutomationNotice, carry-over, blackout and minimum-coverage rules run before anybody is asked to decide
- PersonThe manager approves or refuses on one card that already shows the balance, the coverage and any rule conflict
- AutomationThe robot posts the absence to the HRIS, writes the Outlook calendar entry and updates the planner
- AutomationThe employee receives the decision in the same conversation, with the remaining balance
- SystemPower BI refreshes the coverage view for the site and Orchestrator keeps the full trail
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Entitlement, accrual and booked-absence lookup in the HRIS at the moment of the request
- Notice, carry-over, blackout and minimum-coverage checks against each site's own rule set
- Routing to the right manager or delegate from the hierarchy held in Microsoft Entra ID
- Posting the absence, the calendar entry, the planner update and the confirmation
People decide
- Every approval and every refusal, with the reason recorded against the request
- Competing requests inside one team when coverage will not allow both
- Exceptions: unpaid leave, special leave, negative balances and requests inside the notice period
- Rule changes when an agreement or the law moves
Before and after
Systems and integrations
The stack is deliberately short: one engine, one execution layer, one place where a person decides.
Inputs
- the leave card in Microsoft Teams
- the Teams mobile app on the shop floor
- Microsoft Teams Shifts or the department holiday planner
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- SAP SuccessFactors or Workday absence records
- Outlook calendars
- the site planner where one is still kept
- the Power BI absence model
Human touchpoints: Microsoft Teams Approvals; Action Center tasks in Teams; the confirmation card the employee receives
Technologies used
the request card, the one-tap approval with balance and coverage in view, and the confirmation back to the employee
Arun the rule checks, post the absence, queue and retry work, log every decision
Areads entitlements, writes absences, posts cards, creates calendar entries
Aexception tasks for HR when a rule blocks a request, completed inside Microsoft Teams
Athe schedule source for the coverage check on sites that use it
Amanager hierarchy and delegation, so an approval reaches the person who may give it
Aabsence and coverage view by team, site and week for operations and HR
AIllustrative economic model
Numbers you can check against your own data.
Requests a robot cannot finish are taken out before the arithmetic starts, which is why 1,700 a month enters the calculator as 1,360: one in five still needs an administrator. Six minutes covers reading the form, checking the entitlement and keying the absence twice, and €29 is a fully loaded HR administration rate in Central Europe. The manager's minutes sit outside the calculator on purpose and are priced under the table below. These are Mientha ranges, not a measurement taken at any client.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Employees get a decision in hours instead of weeks and see the remaining balance the moment it changes
- Coverage conflicts surface before the approval, so overtime and agency cover become a choice rather than a discovery on the morning of the shift
- Administration effort moves to the exception share because the absence is written once, in the system of record
- Balances stay current, which removes a recurring class of payroll corrections and the employee conversations attached to them
- The same rules are applied at every site and every application is evidenced, which matters the day a works council asks
- Peaks before a shutdown are absorbed by the flow instead of by overtime in HR administration
The management view
- Managers see their own team's absences and pending requests in one place, with the rule check already done for them
- HR can compare approval time per manager and exception rate per site, which shows where a rule is unclear or a team lead approves everything
- Operations gets a coverage picture by team and week that is current because the flow that posts the absence also updates it
- Every request carries the balance it was checked against, the rule result, the approver and the timestamp, so disputes are settled from the record
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.
- The posting robot signs in with a dedicated HRIS service account whose write rights reach absence records and nothing else; its password is kept in a credential store the workflow can use but nobody can read
- Managers see and approve only their own hierarchy, read from Microsoft Entra ID rather than maintained as a second list somebody forgets to update
- Robots run in the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud, and the cards, requests and confirmations stay inside your Microsoft 365 tenant under the EU Data Boundary
- Every request keeps the balance it was checked against, the rule result, the approver and the timestamp in Orchestrator, while the HRIS remains the system of record
- The rule catalogue is versioned and changes are signed off by HR, so a works council question is answered with a document instead of a recollection
Why now
A works council or a labour inspector now expects evidence that the same rule was applied at every site, and a chain of paper forms and remembered carry-over limits cannot produce it
Balances already sit in an HRIS with an API and managers already live in Microsoft Teams; the only manual part left is the chain between them, which is what makes this a short project rather than a programme
Waiting is not free: the modelled €3,944 a month of administration continues, and so does the overtime bought to cover approvals nobody checked
Relevant executive roles
Leave rules are applied the same way at every plant and each application is evidenced, which turns a grievance into a document
Administration hours and payroll corrections both fall without buying or replacing an HRIS
Coverage gaps appear before the approval, so overtime and agency cover become decisions instead of Monday morning surprises
Common questions and objections
It does, and managers do not open it. The card writes into that same HRIS and adds the one check the HRIS cannot make on its own: who else in the team is already off, and whether the shift still holds the qualifications it needs.
That is exactly why the rule catalogue is the first deliverable rather than an afterthought. Notice periods, carry-over limits and blackout weeks are configured per site, and the robot applies the set that belongs to the person requesting.
Neither do the people requesting, which is why the paper form existed: it was the only thing that travelled. Both the request and the approval work in the Microsoft Teams mobile app.
When this is not the right solution
- Managers already approve inside the HRIS, balances are trusted and payroll sees no corrections from absence data
- Part of the workforce has no Microsoft 365 identity, so there is no card and no way to prove who is asking
- The collective agreement is being renegotiated and the rules will not hold still long enough for a pilot to mean anything
- Volumes are small enough that one administrator clears them the same day they arrive
A question for the next management meeting
How would this company evidence, for a works council, that the same leave rules were applied at all three plants last year?
Implementation approach
A scope without ambiguity, before anything is signed.
We deliver
- A rule catalogue per site, agreed with HR and, where one exists, with the works council
- The request and approval cards in Microsoft Teams, including the mobile view for people without a desk
- The rule engine: balance, notice, carry-over, blackout weeks and minimum coverage per team
- The posting robot for the HRIS, the calendar entry, the planner update and the confirmation
- Delegation and escalation logic taken from the manager hierarchy in Microsoft Entra ID
- The absence and coverage model in Power BI, plus training for team leads and hypercare at the pilot plant
We need from you
- One month of leave requests with their approvals, so we can size the peaks and the exception share
- API access to the HRIS for a read of entitlements and a scoped write of absences
- The rule owners: HR administration, one plant manager and, where relevant, the works council contact
- A pilot plant with its team leads
Stages
Discovery
Rules per site and per agreement, volumes, peaks and exception categories with the process owners
Design
The card, the rule set, delegation, the coverage definition per team and the security model
Build
Cards, rule engine, posting robot and reporting in your own tenant and Orchestrator
Pilot
One plant on real requests, measured on approval time, rule hits and posting accuracy
Rollout
Remaining plants, special leave types and delegation, with hypercare
Optimisation
Rule tuning, new absence types, reporting for operations
Quick win. Effort is driven by how many rule variants the sites carry, whether the schedule sits in Microsoft Teams Shifts or in a spreadsheet, and how clean the entitlement data in the HRIS is.
A team lead approves next week's holiday against a balance he last saw in March.
Send us the leave form you use today and one department's holiday planner. We come back with the rule catalogue we would build and a one-page estimate of the automatable share.
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