How Silver Creek Materials built employee disciplinary tracking where decisions get made

Shannon Kingery is the Director of Compliance at Silver Creek Materials, a Fort Worth-based industrial company. When the system managing employee disciplinary actions no longer fit the way the team worked, they didn't switch tools. They built exactly what was needed, right inside Rippling. The following is Shannon's account of how that happened.

When every HR process lives in one place except one, that one process becomes the problem.

At Silver Creek Materials, almost everything runs through Rippling. Onboarding, time tracking, and the full employee record, all centralized. But disciplinary actions still lived in a legacy system. The data was technically accessible. It just wasn't where anyone needed it to be, and getting to it required leaving the system where every other HR decision was already being made.

That gap showed up every time a manager needed to document a writeup, every time an employee wanted to understand their own record, and every time HR had to run a report before a difficult conversation.

The problem: compliance data that couldn't keep up

The legacy system worked in isolation. Managers had a hard time locating what they'd previously submitted. Employees had almost no visibility into their own disciplinary history. And for HR, pulling a report meant leaving Rippling entirely, searching a separate system, and reconstructing context that should have been immediate.

Before a termination conversation or a performance review, the process was the same every time: go find the data and bring it back. If you were lucky, nothing had been missed.

The answer wasn't better disciplinary tracking software. It was bringing the process into the same place where everything else already lived.

The solution: a custom app built inside Rippling

When Rippling released Custom Apps, we saw an immediate fit. After working through requirements with the Rippling team, the build took a couple of months of refining fields and approval workflows in rounds as the app took shape.

The requirements going in were clear: easy enough for managers to use in a few clicks, structured to mirror the familiar form from the previous system, and surfaced directly on the employee profile where HR already spent most of its time.

Step 1: Define the form and the fields

We spent time working through what the user experience needed to look like before anything was built. The app needed to mirror the existing form closely enough that managers wouldn't have to relearn the process. Once the custom objects were in place, adding and adjusting fields was straightforward -- no code required.

Step 2: Build the approval chain

Every submission moves through a structured approval process before it lands on the employee profile. The workflow was designed so the right people see the right records at the right stage, with managers limited to their own departments and supervisors limited to what they submitted. HR and leadership have full visibility across the org.

Step 3: Surface everything on the employee profile

The final piece was placement. Disciplinary actions now live directly on the employee profile, visible to the employee after approvals are complete, and sitting right alongside the review cycles tab so managers can move between the two during performance season without switching systems.

The impact: the right data, exactly where decisions get made

The most immediate change was visibility. Before a termination conversation, HR can now open an employee's profile and see the full disciplinary history without leaving Rippling. Recent writeups, older actions that no longer meet policy criteria, patterns over time -- all available in the same place where the conversation is being prepared.

The same visibility carries into performance reviews. Because the disciplinary actions tab sits directly alongside the review cycles tab, managers can move between the two during review season without hunting for records they half-remember.

What's already clear is that the fragmentation is gone. The data that used to require a separate system, a separate login, and a manual reconciliation now lives exactly where the team already works.

Want to explore what a custom solution could look like for your team? Reach out to your account manager to connect with Rippling's FDE tea