Building an Employee Portal for 22,000 Non-Desk Healthcare Workers

The company lacked a centralized system to reach 22,000+ employees across multiple geographies, service lines, and industries. Leadership could not target messages to specific employee segments (roles, locations, organizational hierarchies, business classifications). Employees had no unified hub for company announcements, priority communications, or important updates. Communications were fragmented with no viewership tracking, no personalization, and no single source of truth.

JBS Dev built a Python/Django and Next.js (React) Progressive Web Application with targeted leadership communications and content management. The CMS enabled creating, scheduling, and publishing announcements with audience targeting using Workday-derived employee attributes (role, service line, organizational hierarchy, business classification). Features included priority communications, personalized content feeds with audience-aware filtering, push notification support, administrative controls, approval workflows, and publishing oversight. Keycloak-based identity management integrated with Workday as the employee system of record, supporting employees with and without corporate email through custom account claim flows, password reset workflows, and manager-assisted onboarding. Role-based access control supported content creators, administrators, managers, and standard employees. Infrastructure built on AWS Lambda, Aurora PostgreSQL, S3, CloudFront, EventBridge, SQS, and deployed via AWS CDK with multi-environment strategy (Dev/Stage/Prod).

Leadership video communications reached only English-speaking employees. Manual video processing and subtitle creation was time-consuming and error-prone. No automated multilingual support for diverse workforce (Spanish, French, Creole, Somali, Tagalog, Nepali). No viewership analytics to track video engagement, progress milestones, or completion events for compliance reporting. Video distribution coordination consumed administrative effort.

JBS Dev built an automated video processing pipeline with direct upload, AWS Elemental MediaConvert for adaptive bitrate HLS streaming, Amazon Transcribe for automated transcript generation, and Amazon Translate for multi-language subtitle support (5-8 languages including English, Spanish, French, Creole, Somali, Tagalog, Nepali). Video engagement analytics tracked viewership, completion rates, and progress milestones. Automated content moderation used Amazon Rekognition and Amazon Comprehend to prevent inappropriate content. Secure video delivery through CloudFront CDN with global content distribution. Administrators managed all content through Django Admin interface with no technical video expertise required. Videos viewable directly within portal with inline playback, optimized for mobile and varying network conditions.

Employees repeatedly contacted support for routine policy, procedure, and operational questions. No centralized knowledge hub provided instant access to company information. Manual policy searches were time-consuming. Support tickets consumed operational capacity on questions that could be self-served. No AI-powered capability existed to provide contextual, source-grounded answers to employee questions.

JBS Dev built an AI-powered Q&A Hub using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture with AWS Bedrock Knowledge Bases and OpenSearch-powered content retrieval. Two-agent system included: (1) Retrieval & Answer Generation Agent selecting relevant document blocks and generating answers with source attribution and citation links, and (2) Answer Verification Agent evaluating whether the answer addressed the question. Employees asked natural-language questions about policies, procedures, and operational topics, receiving contextual answers grounded in organizational Knowledge Base documents. Documents and videos viewable directly within chat interface with inline playback. Standalone Document Library provided search for employees who preferred manual navigation. Self-service access reduced support ticket volume while ensuring consistent, accurate information delivery with full source traceability.

The company processed approximately 50,000-60,000 support tickets annually, many involving repetitive, rule-based tasks (information lookups, access provisioning, routine system requests). Manual processes consumed substantial operational capacity that could be better applied to higher-value work. Each ticket required individual review, validation, system lookups, provisioning actions, and manual updates across multiple systems. Common issues like duplicates, missing information, or eligibility problems were identified and resolved manually. No automation framework existed for future use cases. The organization lacked integration across multiple systems with proper auditability, governance, and error handling.

JBS Dev designed, developed, and deployed a foundational agentic automation platform within the client's AWS environment, structured in two phases: Phase 1 — Platform Foundation: Core agentic automation platform with AI orchestration layer, reusable workflow framework, ticket ingestion/parsing/orchestration, reusable integration patterns, business rules engine for validation and decisioning, operational controls (audit logging, error handling, governance), human-in-the-loop review for approvals and exceptions, and Salesforce-native reporting dashboards for operational visibility and KPI tracking. Phase 2 — Staples Access Automation (Initial Production Use Case): First production-ready automation workflow for Staples access provisioning requests, including automated ticket ingestion, parsing, validation of purchasing and eligibility requirements, identification and handling of common issues (duplicates, missing PCs), automated provisioning actions in Staples administrative environment, and human-in-the-loop review for approvals and governance control. Ongoing Expansion: The success led to dedicated expansion across three areas: (1) Help Ticket Automation Expansion systematically working through 22 identified automation use cases spanning payroll, HR, IT service desk, finance, vendor operations, and recognition programs (representing approximately 36,842 tickets and 11,566 hands-on hours annually); (2) Corporate Office Efficiency Automations expanding beyond support tickets to automate repetitive administrative workflows across corporate teams and executive functions; (3) Complex Bespoke Automations designing advanced workflows requiring sophisticated business logic and multi-system orchestration.

The Team Member Kiosk operated in a separate Salesforce Sites environment, creating a disconnected employee experience. Frontline team members accessed training, policies, and workforce resources through a standalone platform with a different authentication model (initials-and-ID), limiting identity management capabilities. Maintaining multiple platforms increased operational complexity and support overhead. The shared-device and frontline worker needs were not fully aligned with the evolving Employee Portal strategy, resulting in fragmented experiences and duplicated infrastructure.

JBS Dev redesigned and rebuilt the Team Member Kiosk as a dedicated experience within the Employee Portal platform. Kiosk Experience Redesign: Simplified kiosk user interface optimized for frontline and shared-device usage, integration with existing Employee Portal platform services and components, kiosk-specific navigation and content access patterns while maintaining distinct kiosk identity, purpose-built for shared-device scenarios common in frontline environments. Content Consolidation: Access to training content already available within the Employee Portal and Workday, policy content surfaced through the Employee Portal Knowledge Hub, leverages existing multilingual capabilities (English and Spanish) from the main portal, no duplication of content management—single source of truth. Identity Integration: Onboarding frontline kiosk users into Keycloak as non-email users, retirement of legacy initials-and-ID access model, integration with Employee Portal identity framework, consistent identity management across all employee populations. Migration & Transition: User Acceptance Testing (UAT) support, production deployment and cutover planning, coordination of kiosk transition activities, documented decommission plan for legacy Salesforce Sites environment.