Optimum HR is a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) based in Santa Ana, California, providing comprehensive HR, benefits, and payroll services to small and mid-sized businesses that want to focus on what they’re good at.

With approximately 200 clients relying on their white-glove service, accuracy and compliance aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re mission-critical.

The Challenge: When Excel Spreadsheets Put Compliance at Risk

Before Process Street, Optimum HR’s internal teams relied on Excel spreadsheets and manual communication to manage complex, multi-step processes. When a client terminated their services, team members would verbally hand off tasks to the next person: “I finished my part, so I’d just tell the next person, ‘Hey, your set of tasks is next.” With no automation or clear visibility, critical steps frequently fell through the cracks.

The stakes were particularly high for employee status changes; terminations, leave of absence requests, pay changes, and relocations. Each required careful attention to state-specific compliance regulations, and mistakes carried serious consequences. “If an employee is terminated improperly, it can expose the employer to legal action” Mary Nguyen, Operations Professional at Optimum HR, explained. “Penalties vary depending on the situation. For example, failing to provide the required insurance coverage for companies with over 50 employees can result in regulatory fines.”

The payroll team was catching errors after the fact, employees getting paid incorrectly or being overpaid, but with no way to trace back through their Excel-based system to identify where processes broke down. For Mary and her manager Tim, the VP of Operations, it became clear: their current approach wasn’t scalable, wasn’t reliable, and was putting both their clients and their reputation at risk.

The Solution: Building Automated Workflows for Every Critical Process

Tim began searching for a process management solution that would work for their operations, not a project management tool, but something designed for the recurring, detailed workflows their frontline teams needed to execute flawlessly. He found Process Street.

Mary and Tim started with their most problematic workflow: client terminations. When a company left Optimum HR’s services, the team needed to coordinate terminations across healthcare, payroll, and HR systems, plus compile and deliver complete employee records. They built their first Process Street workflow to automate task assignments and ensure nothing was missed. “Even when a client leaves, we still want to provide a high level of service,” Mary noted. “A poor experience at exit makes it unlikely they’ll refer new clients in the future.” Mary noted. “If they have a bad experience, they’re not going to refer new clients to us in the future.”

The success of that first workflow opened the floodgates. Mary built an Employee Status Change workflow that became their most-used process, with conditional logic handling every scenario; terminations, maternity leave, relocations, promotions, and pay changes. Clients submit a public form that triggers the entire workflow, with tasks automatically routed to the right team members. “You wouldn’t run a termination checklist for someone going on maternity leave,” Mary explained. “Conditional logic ensures each workflow matches the specific situation.”

Since launching in July, the team has processed approximately 900 employee status changes through this workflow alone.

For new client onboarding, Crystal led the implementation of a new client-facing workflow, partnering with Mary on the process design. The workflow assigns tasks directly to clients using Process Street’s permission settings. “Previously, we sent clients a list of required documents by email and shared cloud folders,” Mary said. “Managing 10 to 20 items that way made it easy to lose track of what had been completed or sent.” 

The team also built workflows for employee onboarding, benefits open enrollment, and multiple payroll processes. They even connected workflows together—when their admin lead completes the initial client setup workflow, it automatically triggers three separate workflows for implementation, benefits, and HR departments to work in parallel.

To handle data formatting challenges with their Salesforce integration, Mary leveraged Process Street’s AI tasks to automatically convert comma-separated values to semicolons and remove trailing periods. She also uses AI tasks to reformat dates to the numeric format clients prefer (12/16/2025 instead of “Tuesday, December 16”) and to generate clean summaries of form submissions that filter out empty fields, making client communications and internal handoffs much clearer.

The Results: Measurable Efficiency Gains and Zero Compliance Gaps

The transformation has been dramatic. Optimum HR now has complete visibility into every process, with the ability to track completion dates, identify bottlenecks, and support team members before they fall behind.

Key Metrics:

• ~900 employee status changes processed through automated workflows since July
• 200+ clients served with improved consistency and compliance through open enrollment workflows
• Payroll team capacity projected to increase from 40-50 clients per professional to 60 clients; a 20% capacity increase without additional hires
• Zero compliance penalties since implementing standardized, automated workflows

Beyond the numbers, Mary has seen qualitative improvements across the board. Her implementation specialist works faster and more efficiently, with team members able to seamlessly pick up workflows when colleagues are out of the office. The sales team reports that clients consistently praise how streamlined onboarding has become compared to their previous providers.

“It’s easier no longer working in just Excel, less relying on employees communicating with each other,” Mary reflected. “It makes your team happier that things are being automated. You have trust in your process, in your system.”

The visibility has also enabled better performance management. “Now we’re able to be more proactive and really let our team members take ownership of their tasks,” Mary explained. “It’s hard to quantify, but people feeling supported. I think that helps a lot.”

From Manual Handoffs to Scalable, Compliant Operations

For Optimum HR, Process Street transformed operations from a system dependent on perfect communication and memory into a scalable, automated platform that ensures compliance, supports team growth, and delivers the white-glove client experience that defines their brand.

Mary Nguyen and her team have built a foundation that allows them to confidently take on more clients, reduce the risk of costly compliance errors, and empower their employees with the knowledge and structure they need to excel, all while maintaining the accuracy and attention to detail that their clients depend on, no matter how rushed the timeline.

Note: Our solution is powered by AWS and uses these AWS services: Amazon Bedrock, Lambda, SQS, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, WAF, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, EC2 and ElastiCache for Redis. Process Street serves as the intelligent orchestration layer, where AWS AI services power the advanced reasoning and data processing that turns policies into workflows, and then enables workflow automations, intelligent document processing, and reasoning. Specifically, ProcessStreet’s GenAI capabilities are used to ensure that customers’ policies align with their workflows and that change governance mechanisms control how tasks are updated to achieve compliance in an automated manner. This creates a closed-loop system where AI directly triggers and guides actionable workflows

The post How Optimum HR Eliminated Compliance Errors and Scaled Operations with Process Street first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.