A global manufacturer of commercial-duty automatic transmissions and propulsion systems, manages labor relations across union and non-union facilities. Following q company merger, its HR organization set out to rework the ServiceNow catalog items and workflows supporting employee grievances and disciplinary actions. The objective was to standardize and stabilize these processes while preserving years of historical case data.
The company's HR service delivery spanned three distinct services: grievance handling, union disciplinary actions for UAW 933 in Indianapolis, and non-union disciplinary actions at a separate Tennessee facility. These workflows had grown inconsistent and difficult to manage. Records were generated in ServiceNow, printed as PDFs, and hand-delivered. Still, the workflows were frequently never completed because employees and union representatives did not complete the acknowledgement step built into the process.
The result was a large backlog of open and unacknowledged cases. A report identified roughly 6,600 open or ready items, with about 6,300 concentrated in the disciplinary interview workflow. Of those, the majority appeared to be completed work that had simply never been closed in the system, leaving the data unreliable and the workflows cluttered. This made it difficult for labor relations teams to distinguish active cases from stale ones and undermined confidence in the system as a source of truth.
The post-merger context raised the stakes. The company needed clean, dependable HR processes that could scale to support a larger combined workforce without carrying forward the accumulated data issues of the prior environment.
CoreX partnered with the company's labor relations and HR teams to redesign the grievance and disciplinary catalog items and to develop a practical strategy for the open-case backlog. The redesign keeps historical and new records in a single table so that no historical data is lost, using an HR service field to distinguish which workflow each case belongs to. A reference to the originating case number was proposed so teams can trace cases migrated from the prior process.
Rather than rebuilding from scratch, the approach favored ServiceNow's standard capabilities. The PDF generation central to the disciplinary process and the summary reporting needed by labor relations are both standard platform functions, which kept custom development to a minimum.
To address the backlog, CoreX recommended a whitelist strategy: identify the genuinely active cases, transfer only those into the redesigned workflows, and close out the large volume of completed items that had never been formally resolved. Because transferred grievances restart at the first step under a new case number, guidance was set to transfer only grievances still genuinely at step one and to avoid moving cases that had already advanced.
To reduce the need for migration and prevent recurrence of the backlog, CoreX also recommended assigning tasks to the responsible managers and supervisors and enabling reminder and notification features so that open items are actively surfaced to their owners.
As an in-progress engagement, the expected outcomes are framed around the defined scope of work. The redesigned workflows are expected to give the company a single, reliable view of grievance and disciplinary cases across its union and non-union facilities, with historical records preserved and clearly distinguished from new activity.
The whitelist migration approach is expected to reduce the active caseload from roughly 6,600 open items to a far more manageable set of several hundred active grievances and disciplinary interviews, while closing out the large volume of completed but unacknowledged records. Task assignment and automated reminders are expected to keep cases moving and prevent the acknowledgement gaps that drove the original backlog.
By standardizing its grievance and disciplinary workflows and cleaning up years of accumulated case data, the company is positioned to operate HR labor relations on a trusted, maintainable foundation. The work supports the broader post-merger goal of scaling dependable processes across a larger combined workforce while keeping customization (and the long-term maintenance burden it creates) to a minimum.