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Journeys is now generally available

Written byMax Shen

Published

Today we're announcing general availability of Journeys, which automates onboarding, offboarding, and role changes across IT, HR, security, and every other team those processes touch. Journeys is now available to every Serval customer.

Organizations ranging from 1,000 to more than 150,000 employees already run journeys, including a Fortune 100 manufacturer that uses it for onboarding and offboarding across its entire US workforce.

From tickets to journeys

Serval started by automating individual requests. An employee asks for software access or a password reset, and Serval resolves it with a workflow. The processes that create the most work for IT and HR don't fit in a single ticket, though. Every hire, departure, and job transfer generates dozens of tasks across teams that can't see each other's work.

IT pings HR to find out who starts next week. HR pings IT to find out whether the laptop shipped. The manager gets bounced between both teams just to learn where things stand. And when something slips, like a laptop that isn't there on day one or access that remains live after someone leaves, the employee gets a poor experience and the organization takes on risk.

While legacy ITSM and HRIS solutions offer a version of journeys, they take months to implement and are hard to maintain. And even after a costly rollout, they still assign most of the underlying tasks to people. We built Journeys so one process can coordinate every task across every team, in the right order, over days or weeks, with most of those tasks running on their own.

Automate every task in the journey

A journey is made of tasks split among the employee, their stakeholders, and your Serval teams. Each task can run in the way that fits the work:

Form tasks

Collect information from the assignee and pass it to an attached workflow, like emergency contact details that get written back to Workday. Serval even supports built-in document signing, so new hires never have to leave their journey.

Automated tasks

Run with no person involved as soon as they unlock, like creating a new hire's Okta or Entra account on their start date.

Status checks

Poll an outside system and complete once it reports back, like a background check running in HireRight or Checkr.

Manual tasks

Cover the steps that need a person, like I-9 verification. They're assigned to the right owner and tracked alongside the automated tasks.

Tasks can be gated by a date or by other tasks, so account provisioning can wait for background-check clearance. Every task is a Serval ticket under the hood, which means it carries due dates, SLAs, assignment groups, and custom fields.

Legacy journeys struggle the moment a task touches a system outside their platform. If a pre-built integration doesn’t exist, you’re reliant on custom development or assigning the task to a person. Since Serval can automate any API-supported action in any system, most tasks in a Serval journey can run automatically.

A view for everyone involved

The team that owns a journey gets an overview of every task grouped by assignee, with status and progress for each group. The new hire gets their own view, even before their start date, showing the tasks that are theirs and the progress of everyone else's. Their manager and any other stakeholders get a view of their own as well.

Anyone working through a journey can ask Serval what a step means or what's blocking them. When the agent can't resolve a question on its own, it escalates the conversation to a ticket for your team.

Journeys also cross team boundaries. An HR-owned onboarding journey can hand laptop provisioning to IT and badge access to Facilities. Everyone sees the whole journey, but each team can act only on its own tasks, so every team keeps control of its work while following the same process.

Build journeys in days, not months

Journeys are built with Catalyst, Serval's automation agent. Describe the journey in plain language: what triggers it, the tasks, who owns each one, and which tasks wait on others. You can also upload a spreadsheet or flowchart of the process you run today. Catalyst assembles the journey, builds or attaches the workflow behind each task, and wires up the dependencies.

You can run the draft on yourself or a test user before publishing it, and ask Catalyst for changes in the same chat. When your process changes later, you update the journey the same way. To start even faster, install one of Serval's prebuilt journeys and adapt it to your organization.

Enterprise-grade governance

Journeys runs inside the same governed platform as the rest of Serval. Every task, approval, and handoff is logged, and each organization controls who can build or modify a journey.

Access stays where your security team already manages it. A journey can trigger access requests and track them to completion, while the access policies and approvals live in Serval access management.

Ready on day one

With Journeys, a new hire shows up on day one with their laptop, their accounts, and everything else they need. When someone leaves, their access, devices, and other wind-down tasks are handled on schedule. IT and HR get their time back for higher-impact work, and every employee at your company gets a seamless experience.

Journeys is available today to all Serval customers. Book a demo to see it in action and explore our docs to learn more.

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