The challenge
The provider runs outpatient pharmacy, clinic and inpatient services across multiple brands and four separate email domains. A new pharmacy technician in Ontario, a clinic nurse in British Columbia and an inpatient staff member in New Brunswick each needed a different set of accounts, a different mailbox domain, and a different combination of clinical systems switched on before their first shift.
That work was being done by hand, per hire, per site, by people reading a checklist. Manual onboarding fails in a particular direction: the accounts that get missed are the ones the person does not need on day one, so nobody notices until a nurse cannot reach a system three weeks in.
There was also a constraint nobody had priced. Discovery established that fewer than 10% of existing directory records carried a manager, and every approval and every notification in an onboarding workflow routes on that attribute. The automation everyone had in mind could not be built on the directory as it stood.
The solution
The platform choice was corrected before anything was built. The engagement arrived framed around Microsoft Forms, with the client planning to author forms elsewhere and import them. Forms will not carry a multi-branch approval process with conditional system provisioning, and it was said early: "We are not even using Forms. We must use PowerApps." Correcting a platform assumption during scoping costs a conversation. Correcting it during UAT costs the project.
The process was modelled as fourteen discrete steps before a flow was authored. Each step was written down with its actor, its trigger, its target and the notifications it fires, and issued back to the client as a numbered set of questions. Do the reminders at 7 and 28 days fire from the start date, or from the end of a 90-day probation? Does the hiring manager get copied when HR is notified? Those questions are unglamorous, and each one is a defect that never happened.
The manager-attribute gap was raised as a client decision rather than silently worked around. Inferring approvers from site or job title would have produced a workflow that appeared to work while routing approvals to the wrong people.
Delivery was phased along the client's own risk appetite: onboarding for the first line of business went live in January 2024, clinic onboarding followed on 10 June 2024, and leave of absence and termination, the two processes with the sharpest access-control consequences, came third in August 2024.
The results
A hiring manager now completes one request. The workflow resolves the brand, provisions the accounts, issues credentials, tracks the checklist and chases the reminders, and at the other end of the employment relationship the termination path revokes what the onboarding path granted.