Cortex — workforce orchestration across HR, rostering, identity, and service desk.

The brief

A national education and care provider operating multiple internal systems — intelliHR for HR, Humanforce for rostering, Entra ID for identity, a bespoke internal platform (MyGo1) supporting operations, and a Claromentis-based intranet for company-wide content and communication. Each system maintained an independent record of staff data, and the records diverged from one another on a recurring basis.

Every onboarding, role change, leave-of-absence event, and offboarding required manual coordination across these systems. Pay cycles surfaced the resulting gaps as rostering conflicts, and the service desk processed the remainder as exception tickets. The compliance team was unable to produce a unified audit trail without manually consolidating exports from each platform.

What we found

• More than five source systems with no shared identity. Each employee was assigned a distinct identifier in each system, with reconciliation conducted by name and date of birth where required.
• Manual coordination required for every change. Hires, promotions, transfers, and terminations were each processed across approximately six systems.
• The pay run consistently surfaced upstream errors. Rostering conflicts and pay disputes occurred because upstream changes had not been reconciled prior to the pay cycle.
• Future-dated changes were inconsistently propagated. Forward-dated transactions — including promotions, contract changes, and returns from leave — landed in only a subset of systems.
• No cross-system audit trail was available. Compliance teams consolidated exports manually to answer enquiries that should have been resolved in seconds.

What we did

Designed and delivered Cortex, a cloud-native workforce orchestration platform deployed on Azure Kubernetes Service. Kafka carries the events, Kong governs the APIs, and a custom workflow engine owns the multi-step lifecycles that span every connected system.

Cortex unifies intelliHR (HR system of record), Humanforce (rostering and workforce management), Microsoft Entra ID and Graph (identity, mailbox, and access provisioning), MyGo1 (internal operational platform), the Claromentis-based intranet (company-wide content and communication), and service-desk ticketing (automated exception handling).

Onboarding, offboarding, role transitions, future-dated changes, and compliance audit trails now flow automatically across every system — accurately, traceably, pay-run-aware, and self-healing under failure conditions.

Document services (Azure Storage, Document Intelligence, and PostgreSQL) operate alongside Cortex to maintain durable storage of contracts, compliance certificates, and onboarding artefacts.

The phased rollout

Every engagement is delivered using The Ascent Method — Map, Architect, Build, Operate.

1. P1
   Map: source-system inventory and canonical employee model (weeks 1–6). Documented every system, every system owner, and every record disagreement identified across the platforms.
2. P2
   Architect + Build: Kafka and workflow engine baseline on AKS (weeks 4–14). Event contracts formally documented, idempotent retries implemented, dead-letter queue established, and audit logging in place.
3. P3
   Build: connectors for intelliHR, Humanforce, and Entra ID (weeks 10–22). Source-of-truth roles formally agreed and reconciliation loops implemented.
4. P4
   Build: MyGo1, the Claromentis intranet, and service-desk exception handling (weeks 18–34). Operational platforms onboarded; exception tickets are generated only when human intervention is required.
5. P5
   Build: future-dated changes and pay-run gating (weeks 28–42). Forward-dated transactions are applied on the correct effective date in every connected system.
6. P6
   Operate: audit, document services, and handover (weeks 36–48). Compliance reporting consolidated to a single platform; runbooks and warranty in place.

Outcomes

Hires, transfers, terminations, and contract changes flow through Cortex once and propagate consistently to every connected system. The pay run no longer functions as the point of discovery for upstream changes.

Future-dated transactions are treated as first-class operations — a transfer scheduled today is applied across every system on its effective date rather than on the date of processing.

Every change generates a structured audit trail across all connected systems. Compliance evidence is retrieved by query rather than assembled as a project.

In the event of a downstream API issue or vendor outage, Cortex retries, alerts, and reconciles automatically. Exception handling generates a service-desk ticket only when human intervention is genuinely required.