Working smarter with automation

Construction companies build in the real world, but they’re also increasingly navigating how to build the best digital environments to serve both their customers and employees. Modern Niagara is known for its expert work designing, constructing, and operating mechanical, electrical, energy, and technology systems for buildings. It’s also focused on decarbonization efforts to meet Canada’s carbon reduction targets. Underlying its innovations is a strong digital foundation, including an in-house development team and a cloud-first technology strategy.

Members of Modern Niagara’s data and analytics team take pride in how their work — from integrating applications to managing reporting — helps colleagues focus on their jobs and do better work for clients. “The most exciting thing for me is when I find a solution that saves people time,” says Modern Niagara Integration Architect Qais Maash. “I’m always looking out for manual processes where I can automate, optimize, and improve the user experience.”

The team recently challenged itself to solve a problem that touched all Modern Niagara employees: delivering secure electronic pay stubs. Using the Adobe Document Generation API, part of Adobe Acrobat Services, Maash quickly developed a solution that saved time for everyone at the company.

“Technology can improve things for our employees and our customers,” says Charles Davis, Director of Data and Analytics for Modern Niagara. “Even small things like getting easier, reliable access to pay stubs benefits our employees.”

Halving help requests

When Modern Niagara switched to a new human resources information system for HR and payroll several years ago, it centralized processes into a single portal where employees can do everything from submitting time off requests to updating their addresses. But the IT team received around 20 password reset requests a week, primarily from people trying to check their pay stubs. When password security increased by the vendor, requiring longer passwords with mandatory resets every three months, leadership worried that password problems would overwhelm help staff.

“The IT team estimated they would need to put two people full time on password resets,” says Davis. “We thought we could head off a lot of this work if we could email people their pay stubs. But it turned out that for security reasons, there was no built-in method to pull pay stubs as PDFs.”

The data and analytics team is experienced at solving these types of problems. When existing software doesn’t provide the features that the company needs, people like Maash build the solutions themselves. When looking deeper into pay stubs, he discovered that he could extract pay information in JSON format. He just needed an automated way of transforming that data into highly secure PDF files at scale.

“I looked at different vendors, but I always had Adobe in my mind because when you think PDF, you think Adobe,” says Maash. “The Document Generation API is exactly what I needed to dynamically turn JSON data into password-protected PDF documents. It was so easy to use. I just walked through the Adobe documentation step by step to create a proof of concept in three days.”

Maash built multiple templates — in English and French — in Microsoft Word using dynamic fields. Every week, a scheduled middleware process using Boomi, pulls pay information as encrypted JSON data for people who opt-in to the pay stub emails. The opt-in function was developed using Azure Logic App. To create a PDF file, the Document Generation API pulls the JSON data into the correct template depending on the employee’s preferred language. The API includes built-in functions that add helpful information to the documents, such as applying correct number formatting or adding columns to show total earnings, hours, and deductions. Finally, the program takes the generated PDF, protects it using a unique password, and emails it to the employee.

Employees clearly appreciate the convenience of receiving their pay stubs by email, which they can open through solutions such as Adobe Acrobat Reader across desktop or mobile devices. The company generates around 8,000 pay stubs a month for weekly and bi-weekly pay groups, and that number is growing. In the first six months after introducing the process, the number of people who agreed to emailed pay statements reached 75%.

Password reset requests declined after the process went live, with average tickets per month falling by 50%. The IT team uses the time saved from reduced password reset tickets to support other software applications and employee requests, reducing the time to resolution for support tickets by 80%.

Building value through technology

Having seen how easy it was to work with the Adobe APIs, Maash has plans to use it with other types of documents, such as generating contracts or adding fields for digital signatures.

“Like a lot of technologies, you know it’s working well because no one’s talking about it,” says Davis. “With Acrobat Services, we eliminated a lot of roadblocks by enabling people to automatically access what they want. It shows the value that investing in digital has on employee engagement.”

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Content as a Service - Monday, April 3, 2023 at 16:53 (no-lazy)

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