Client:
Our client is a world leader in flexible HR solutions. In particular, they offer Employer of Record and Agent of Record services that support staffing, recruiting, and mass talent procurement. These services allow companies to expand and deploy their global distributed workforce.
Challenge:
This client was undergoing a massive global expansion that included significant organic growth in core markets, and substantial growth through acquisitions in emerging markets. Supporting this growth is a vision to move from a collection of regional entities to a truly integrated global solutions provider. They also saw the potential to transform how their customer base worked with them by creating flexible and on-demand integrations that would enable workforce and payroll data to flow seamlessly between their customer systems and their own.
This strategy required a transformation of their IT infrastructure and created the need for an integration strategy. Since employment laws and regulations are local, they need to be able to provide tailored, secure, and localized services in each market, while being supported by a global infrastructure. Rather than contemplating a monolithic IT infrastructure, they envisioned country-specific services that honored data sovereignty, with an integrated back office so they could serve their global customers with a common user experience. What this meant was developing local technology solutions, then creating an integration framework that would enable the company to act as a global entity.
Dispatch was engaged to help create a scalable integration strategy, build out canonical integrations, help develop core API infrastructure, and build capability across the organization to help them realize their vision.
Solution:
Dispatch was engaged to work in multiple project streams as an integrated partner. Some of the key elements of our engagement include:
- iPaaS vendor selection
- One of the first decisions in the digital transformation journey was the selection of an integration platform suitable to meet the broad business requirements of the client. Some of these requirements included:
- Uncompromised security. The security requirements for payroll are incredibly high because it includes Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of the workforce that can be subject to local and regional regulations (e.g. GDPR), data sovereignty requirements, and financial data. Any integration system needed to be highly secure, and have strict governance controls regarding access, incident logging, and error handling.
- Uncompromised reliability. The platform would be a core component of the company’s infrastructure and business offering. Simply put, an unreliable system could impact payroll and customer experience, and undermine trust.
- High scalability. The company was both growing rapidly and undergoing significant transformation. Integration solutions needed to be developed and deployed rapidly and with high reusability. The solution also needed to be able to accommodate millions of payroll transactions at a global scale without any issue.
- Easy to Use and Support. The client did not want a solution that required highly specialized skills to build, deploy and manage integrations – this would limit scalability, reduce flexibility, and increase costs.
- After a formal vendor selection process, Workato was selected as the integration platform.
- API enhancements
- As the integration platform was being selected, Dispatch worked with the client to identify integration use-cases that would be strong candidates for automation. An outcome of this assessment was the determination that the client needed to build some new API functionality and enhance existing functionality with their core systems. Dispatch helped the client with these new APIs as follows:
- Dispatch helped the client adopt the OpenAPI standard.
- Dispatch helped the client migrate to the DotNet Core platform to ensure the stability and supportability of their integrations.
- Dispatch helped dockerize the client’s host systems.
- Dispatch helped implement a security framework and application insights capability for improved API security and monitoring.
- Dispatch built several APIs to help accelerate development.
- Lighthouse Integrations
- Dispatch led the development of several customer-facing integrations and workflow automation solutions that eliminated manual data entry and the associated costs and error rates. These integrations were designed to connect directly with key customer systems and enable a near-real-time flow of data and an improved customer experience. The customer base ranges from local staffing agencies with modest integration requirements, to global powerhouses with unique and custom needs. The lighthouse integrations were designed to address several use-cases that were commonly seen with customers of varying sizes, including transferring workforce core data, onboarding and offboarding workers, transferring time & attendance data for payroll, and supporting the management and administration of workforces and customer contracts. Some of these integrations include:
- LaborEdge
- Sense
- SAP Fieldglass
- TalentWave
- NextCrew
- Zoho Workerly
- BlueSky
- PipeDrive
- SFTP File Transfer Automation
- Each of the integration targets was used by several end customers, which enabled the re-use of the core integration logic and connections. While many enterprise customers have custom logic or unique field mapping requirements, the potential to re-use integrations significantly improves the ability to “light-up” automations with new customers quickly – often with just modest configuration changes needed.
- While these integrations were built by Dispatch, there was a concerted effort to transfer knowledge and capabilities to the client team so that they can build new integrations, enhance existing ones, and provide support to all integrations in production.
- Global Strategy Support
- In addition to building out APIs and integrations using Workato, Dispatch also worked closely with the client to develop and implement a global strategy that would enable a frictionless experience for both end customers and workers. The integration infrastructure creates the potential to build new user experiences that help workers quickly onboard and manage their work experience anywhere in the world, and for end customers to get insights and manage their global workforce. Dispatch helps with the formulation of this strategy and the development of detailed specifications and requirements needed to build these solutions. In particular, because of the varying jurisdictional requirements regarding payroll data management, the ability to create and manage global “views” while protecting PII is a critical element of the project that Dispatch is helping define.
Outcome
This is a continuing journey with our client, and we are excited to be able to support them as they realize their global vision. The work done so far has helped build momentum for accelerated transformation. The customer integrations have saved significant time, improved quality, reduced mundane and costly data administration tasks, and enhanced customer experiences.
