Design and Pilot Evaluation of a Traceability-Oriented Enterprise Architecture for Advance Salary Payment Management

Advance salary payment services are increasingly used to improve employee financial flexibility; however, their implementation is often constrained by fragmented workflows, disconnected HR–payroll coordination, inconsistent accounting synchronization, and limited transaction traceability. This study proposes and evaluates a Traceability-Oriented Enterprise Architecture (TOEA) for advance salary payment management in enterprise payroll environments. The proposed architecture integrates employee self-service interaction, workflow automation, payroll synchronization, payment processing, audit-oriented monitoring, and enterprise interoperability within a unified digital platform. The study employs a Design Science Research approach and introduces a layered architectural framework together with a unified enterprise data model supporting end-to-end lifecycle traceability through globally unique identifiers. The architecture was implemented as a functional prototype and evaluated through a pilot deployment in a university environment employing more than 1000 staff members. The evaluation included process-based comparison, expert validation involving 16 participants from HR, payroll accounting, and management, scalability assessment under increasing workload scenarios, and qualitative stakeholder feedback analysis. The results indicate improvements in workflow transparency, auditability, payroll synchronization, and organizational coordination, while reducing process fragmentation and manual coordination activities. Expert assessments demonstrated positive perceptions of workflow transparency, traceability, and operational monitoring. The findings suggest that traceability-oriented architectural principles provide an effective foundation for interoperable and auditable salary advance management systems and offer a scalable basis for future integration of intelligent analytics and decision-support services.