In the process of continuously improving our product and its features, OrangeHRM has introduced the Request Desk module to provide an efficient work environment for our customers. In a typical work environment, an employee may need to request different departments for different requirements. May that be an employment letter from the HR Department or an equipment upgrade from the IT department, these requests will be hectic to manage and keep track of. In order to mitigate the hassle, the OrangeHRM Request Desk module offers employees to create different requests to different entities in your organization to get their requirements facilitated; where every conversation will be held on record, every request would be kept on track and efficiently managed by relevant parties.  

 

How to Navigate?

This will take you to the Request Desk module. The Request Desk and OrangeHRM will connect the employee profile and identify the employee with the email address.

 

Configure Request Types

 

In order for employees to use the request desk and submit requests, request types should be kept configured in the system. In order to add or configure request types, Admin must open the configure request types section.

 

 

Add Request Types

 

When you click on the add request type button, a quick pop-up window will appear to capture basic information about the request type.

Field Name	Purpose
Request Type Name	The name of the request type you want to create.
Approver Required	If the request type needs to be approved by a supervisor or any other employee before the request pass to the final receiver.
Primary Request Owner	The intended receiver of the request.

 

Filling out the above information and hitting save will bring you to a more detailed window which you will have most of the configurations to be made for the request type.

 

Request Owner

 

Request owner will be the employee where this request is headed to. In situations like requesting HR documents, it would be towards the HR Manager, If it is an IT-related request, the request should go to the IT Manager or the relevant person. Likewise, the request owner will be the person who will be responsible for the request facilitation.

 

Here, you will have the capability to add a secondary request owner to the request type. The purpose of the secondary request owner is to take responsibility for the request in an absence of the primary request owner.

 

Approver Required

 

Organizations have regulations where all or certain requests may need prior approval from an employee in the organization before it reaches the request owner. For an instance, if the employee is applying for a Visa request, the employee's request may not be sufficient, this request may need to be approved by the supervisor of the employee or any other person who approves the travel and the visa request. In such cases, to support the approval work-flow and make life easier for our user, Approver Required, if enabled will trigger approval from a third party where the employee needs to define when submitting a request. This will be a mandatory field to fill out for a request to be submitted if enabled.

 

General Fields

Every request will have common fields which the user needs to fill out when submitting the request. To save time in configuring a request type, the OrangeHRM team as default, has put together the general fields which will be available on any request type.

Field Name	Purpose
Request Title	Title of the request the user intends to place
Request Description	A description of the request
Priority	The priority of the request - A request can be categorized as Very Urgent, Reasonably Urgent, Urgent, Not Urgent
Resolution Date	The date of the request should be resolved for the employee
Submission Date	Date of submission which will be automatically captured by the system

 

Custom Fields

 

Each request may need to capture its own fields. In such cases, the request should be able to capture that unique information in whichever data type, when the request is submitted. To do that, custom fields can be added to a request.

 

Adding Custom Fields

 

Data Field Name	Purpose
Field Name	Name of the custom field
Type	The type of the custom field
Required	If the field record mandatory information
Conditional Field	If the custom field is activated per information on another field

 

Custom Field Data Types

Custom fields in the request desk can record almost all your data. Types of custom field data include Text, Drop-down, Number, Email, Text Area, Date, checkboxes, Radio Buttons, Attachments, Currency, and Country. Therefore the user can collect a range of data from the above list from custom fields.

 

Employee Requests

Employee Requests will show a list of employee requests made in the system with the basic information about the request including the ID, name, status, priority as well as the request owner.

The system also allows filtering the list based on the following criteria,

When clicked on a request, the system will take us inside the request where the user can view the information, and based on the information action can be taken on the request.

 

Request Details

Request details will show you all the information that the employee has added when placing the request. This section includes all the general and custom field information requested when configuring the Request Type.

 

Actions

Actions will have all relevant actions that a user can take to a submitted request. These actions will be based on the user role and the role that the employee plays in the specific request.

 

A user who had placed a request is capable of editing and withdrawing a request. An approver for a request would be able to either approve or reject a request. This view which is for the Administrator will have the privilege to edit, Resolve, or Withdraw a request.

Furthermore, each of these actions will have email notifications sending out from the system.

 

Request Info - This function is the formal way to get the additional information required to facilitate the request then from the conversation panel, yet the difference between this and the conversations is that any conversation will be visible to any party involved in the request unless specifically left out. But, the Request Info feature allows the user to directly reach the employee who created the request.

 

Attachment

The user is also allowed to attach an attachment related to the request submitted.

 

Conversation Section

One of the most critical aspects of request management is to track down conversations that happened for the request. OrangeHRM request desk module encourages the user to have a conversation about the request and keep a record of that for future use. This allows the employees to be more focused and efficient in getting the request fulfilled easily.

 

Reports

OrangeHRM request desk module provides comprehensive reporting on the requests placed and resolved within the system. These reports consist of a reports dashboard and different individual reports to support your decision making. Each of these blocks provides an idea of the requests in the system based on their status. These reports can only be accessed by the admin of the system.

You also have the capability to select the statuses you want to see from the charts and get a clear picture of what actions needed to be taken to improve the productivity of the request desk.

Below are screen captures of the same chart. The first chart shows information about all the sources while the second shows only of the selected sources.

 

Request Information Report

This report provides a detailed view of the requests made in the system. The report consists of information including the owner, status, priority, and resolution date.

 

Other reports

The system provides other reports like Requests by Type, Requests by Status, Requests by Priority, and Request closure report which shows information based on the given criteria. These reports will provide a graphical overview as well as a detailed view to provide the information you need the most. These reports can also be exported to .pdf or .csv formats for you to use them offline.

Below is the example of a Requests by type report,

 

Audit Trail

The audit trail will record any activity that took place in the system along with information like who carried out the action and date and time information. This allows you to track the changes in any request made in the system which will provide a better understanding of special situations.

 

Results in the audit trail can also be filtered based on the following criteria,