The people in your service desk stay current when the HR system is the source: every employee comes in with department, job, location and manager, and is archived after the leaving date. An integration does that with every change in HR, whereas an Excel import only takes over the state at one moment.
Many service desks occasionally import an export from HR. Between two imports, a new colleague cannot log a call, and someone who has left can still log in to the self-service portal. Approvals and reports per department are also only right if the organisation in the service desk is right. This article shows where an import falls short and what you put in its place.
What belongs in the service desk, and what does not
For a ticket, the service desk needs name, job, department, location, manager and work address. Nothing more. BSN (Dutch citizen service number), salary and home address do not go along. An export from HR quickly contains more columns than that. An integration reads only the fields the service desk uses.
One fixed key per employee
An import that matches on name or email address can create a second person when a name changes after a marriage or divorce. With the personnel number as a fixed key, that does not happen.
The same applies to departments. If HR renames a department, you want to keep the same department in the service desk, with its members and tickets. That works if the integration remembers the code from HR for each department.
Departments as a tree or as a list
HR knows departments as a tree. TOPdesk knows them as a flat list with unique names. If two divisions both have a Secretariat department, TOPdesk cannot store both under the same name. The solution is for such a department to get the name of its parent department added.
The order matters too. Departments, locations and cost centres come first, people after. That way a new department already exists before the first employee refers to it. With an integration of AFAS with TOPdesk or YouForce with TOPdesk, it runs in that order.
Archiving leavers
After the leaving date, a person is archived or deactivated, not deleted. Calls and history then stay visible, and the leaver can no longer submit new tickets.
An employee with two employment contracts is one person in the service desk. They are only archived when the last employment contract ends.
TOPdesk has a pitfall here. Service desk staff are often operators there as well. If you archive their person card, you archive the operator along with it. An integration should report that first instead of doing it straight away.
Three edge cases per service desk
TOPdesk: the self-service portal. A new person in TOPdesk can log in to the self-service portal straight away by default. You only want to switch that access on from the start date.
Xurrent: no person without an email address. Xurrent does not store a person without an email address, and the work address is sometimes only in HR after IT has created the account. The person comes in as soon as the address is there, with a notification if that happens too close to the start date. See the integration of AFAS with Xurrent.
ServiceNow: two sources. ServiceNow often already pulls users from Active Directory, with the manager as an LDAP path. That import can stay. You agree per field which source wins, for example the login name from Active Directory and department and manager from HR. That way no second user per employee appears. See the integration of Workday with ServiceNow.
Moving away from an import
If there are already people in the service desk at the start, they are matched once on email address and name. Whatever cannot be matched goes on a list to check. After that, the personnel number is the key and the import is no longer needed.
If TOPdesk runs on-premise, that works too, as long as TOPdesk is reachable for the integration. If it is not reachable from the internet, a small KoppelHet program runs inside your network.
How KoppelHet builds this
KoppelHet builds the integration per organisation on its own platform. We read the HR system with only the fields the service desk needs, and write through the service desk's API with a dedicated account that can only reach people, departments and tickets. The platform logs every change. On an error, such as a department that does not exist, the administrator gets a notification naming the employee. We build this from AFAS, Visma Raet YouForce, Workday or HiBob to TOPdesk, ServiceNow, Freshservice, Xurrent or Jira Service Management. As an indication, allow two to four weeks until go-live.
Read more about people and departments in the service desk, about the whole integration from HR to the service desk, or about multiple employers and locations.