How to configure the Appraisd Business Logic tool

Requirements for configuring and using the business logic tool in your Appraisd account

• Incoming user fields that you would like to use in the logic must already be mapped to one of the 8 custom people fields configured in your account
• You must be a configurator to see and configure the business logic rules

What is the Appraisd business logic tool?

The Appraisd business logic tool is used to simplify your user provisioning integrations, or processes, by allowing you to create and maintain business rules for assigning users the correct Appraisd specific user attributes when adding and updating them in the Appraisd system.

This ensures your users are always configured correctly in Appraisd with access to the right features and are assigned the correct reviews. 

If you've built an automated user provisioning integration (or used one of our native integrations) it means:

• Significantly simplifying the work and time needed to get the integration up and running
• No need to wait on availability from your perennially overloaded technology teams when changes in your business, or performance management processes, result in a required change to your integration

If HR are manually importing users in bulk, this means:

• HR team members don't need to remember, or refer to, the business rules when collating user data for upload
• No more complex data manipulation in Excel to populate Appraisd attributes and IDs before upload, leading to a major reduction in user error during the upload process

Which user update types does the business logic tool work with?

The business logic tool runs on the following user updates:

• All native HRIS integrations configured on the account
• The bulk import/audit user tool in the administration centre
• User endpoints in the Appraisd API

It does not run for these user updates:

• Admin centre
  • add a single user
  • edit user - single or bulk
• User profile
  • edit user
• Team page
  • add a direct report

Which Appraisd specific user attributes can you create business logic for?

• Administration group
• Review group
• Default form
• Job description
• Alternative job description
• Sign-on type
• Default workflow
• Default reviewer
• Default matrix manager
• Default sign-off manager

Structure of business logic rules

1. For each Appraisd specific user field you configure one or more rules:
   
   Each rule contains:
   1. A rule attribute value
   2. A rule operator
   3. One or more conditions
      
      Each condition contains: 
      1. A condition attribute field
      2. A condition operator
      3. One or more condition parameters
         

What each of element of the business logic rules do

1. Rule attribute value
   It is the value which will be saved against the user being added/updated for the selected user field if the rule passes
2. Rule operator
   Determines if a user's data must match 'All' or 'Any' of the configured conditions to pass the rule and have the rule attribute value saved against them
3. Condition attribute field
   This is the user field the condition is run against
4. Condition operator
   Determines that logic which is used to match the condition attribute field to the condition parameter. The possible operators are:
   1. text field operators
      1. is any of
      2. is not any of
      3. contains
      4. does not contain
   2. date range operators
      1. is before
      2. is after
5. Condition parameter
   The value which must exactly match the user field set in the 'condition attribute field' for the condition to pass

How do we apply the configured business logic rules?

For each Appraisd user field you create a set of rules in priority order from top to bottom. As we process the addition/update of each user you send us we run the configured rules for each Appraisd user field in priority order.

If the data for the user passes the condition(s) set up for a given rule, then we set their Appraisd field to the rule attribute value configured for that rule. If the user fails a rule, then the next rule is run against their data and so on down the list of rules for that user field.

If the user doesn't match any of the configured rules, we will try to add/update the user with no value set for the field.

n.b. some Appraisd user attributes are required so a user that doesn't match one of your rules will error when we try to add/update them with no value set. We therefore suggest creating a 'default' rule as the last rule for each user field to prevent this happening, though you can also create a 'custom error' rule if you would prefer to throw an error with your customised wording in this situation. 

 

Configuring the business logic mapping rules

 

1. Navigate to the Business Logic section of the configuration area in Appraisd
   
   n.b. this section of configuration is only visible if your company has the advanced user provisioning package
2. Choose the Appraisd user field that you would like to create business logic rules for by clicking on it. This will open the rules panel for that field
   
   In this example we're creating rules for the Administration group field, but all fields can be configured in the same way.
3. Click the Add a rule button to add our first rule for this field, then select the administration group that we want to create the rule for. We'll choose the Amsterdam admin group
   
4. Next select whether 'All' or 'Any' of the conditions need to apply to the incoming user to be allocated to the Amsterdam admin group. We'll choose 'Any' in this case:
   
5. Now we need to add the condition for users to be added to the Netherlands admin group by pressing on the Add a condition button
   
6. Next, we select the condition attribute which is the custom field holding the data we will be applying the condition to. In this case 'Office location'
   
7. As we want to be able to select multiple office locations to map to the Netherlands admin group we'll select the 'is any of' condition operator
   
8. Now we need to add a condition parameter or parameters. We do this by pressing on the 'New parameter' button
   
9. Once added, type in the value for the condition parameter and repeat for any other parameters
   
   
10. Repeat the steps 3-9 to create the rest of your rules. In this example I've added rules for the other admin groups
    
11. Finally, we need to save our changes by pressing on the 'Save all' button
    

You've now created your business logic for the administration groups in your account.

 

Important things to know about business logic

1. Rules are run in order of top to bottom

For each specific user attribute that you configure business logic for the rules will be run from top to bottom. Once a user matches a rule they will be assigned the rule's attribute value and no further rules will be run on that user. This means that you must consider the order of your rules carefully to ensure users are given the right attribute value. 

An example to illustrate this is the two rules below where the order matters:

When ordered as shown above, all employees in the HR department will be placed into the HR admin group, then any remaining employees in London or Glasgow office locations will be placed into the UK admin group. HR employees in the London or Glasgow office locations will remain in the HR admin group.

However, when ordered as above, all employees in London or Glasgow will be added to the UK admin group. Any remaining employees that are in the HR department will be placed into the HR admin group. HR employees in the London or Glasgow office locations will remain in the UK admin group and not be in the HR admin group.

As you can see the order of your rules is very important. You can use the 'Move up' and 'Move down' to reorder your rules as necessary.

 

Default rules

Default rules do not have any conditions and will always assign the rule's attribute to any remaining employees who have not already matched a rule above it. This can be helpful to reduce the number of rules you need to create.

An example would be where we have two admin groups in our account, 'HR' and 'Default admin group', where we want all employees in the HR department to be in the HR admin group and employees in all the other departments to be in the default admin group. 

By using a default rule, we do not need to create a rule which lists all the other departments to put them into the default admin group. 

 

Error rules

Error rules can be used to throw custom error messages as part of business logic mapping. They are to be used in place of default rules, you cannot use both an error and default rule for the same user attribute.

An example would be where we want to throw an error when users are not being mapped to an admin group according to our configured rules

Here a user with their office location set to 'New York' would not match either the UK or France rules, so the error rule would apply to them and show the configured custom error message to the user instead.

 

Using multiple conditions are part of the same rule

You can use multiple conditions are part of a single rule. This can be helpful if you need to use more than one of a user's custom field to determine which attribute they should receive. 

In the example below we want to set the review groups for our users based on both their office location and their department. 

In this rule we want to put any employee who have both an office location of London or Glasgow and a department of Sales into the Sales UK review group. We have therefore selected 'All' for the rule's operator. 

However, if we'd wanted to put anyone who has either an office location of London or Glasgow, or a department of Sales we would have used the 'Any' operator instead.