Name: How Electric saves their engineering team hundreds of hours on building and maintaining HRIS integrations
Uploaded: 2024-08-05T20:53:11.299Z
Duration: 30 min 4 s
Description: How Electric saves their engineering team hundreds of hours on building and maintaining HRIS integrations

Transcript for "How Electric saves their engineering team hundreds of hours on building and maintaining HRIS integrations": Really excited for this webinar today. We have a great guest and who's going to share a lot about how electric uses merge to, to save engineers 100 of hours, unlock cost savings, and close more sales. And a little bit of housekeeping. So if you have any questions, you wanna, enter them into the chat, there is a q and a tab, and we can get to it. Hopefully, we'll be able to get to it at the end. If there's not enough time to answer it, we'll also make sure to follow-up via email. Finally, if you have to hop off at any time or you have a friend you might wanna join in the middle, you can absolutely do that. This this is recorded, so you can always visit it later. Great. Now with quick introductions, I wanted to introduce our esteemed guest, Greg. I'll let you introduce yourself. Thank you, Shintzy. Hi, everyone. I'm Greg Pellegrino. Like Shintzy said, I'm the VP of engineering in electric. I've been here for about 3 years and oversee all of our engineering teams. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And I'm Shunty, cofounder and CEO at Merge. So for a quick introduction on Merge, we offer APIs to allow developers to integrate once to offer full category of integrations to your customers. This is meant specifically for customer facing integrations. Our platform makes secure data access easy across several different categories, including HRIS, accounting, CRM, file storage, ATS, and more. So you might be wondering, what does merge really do? And the answer is we handle the full integration's lifecycle. One thesis that my cofounder and I had when we started the company was that it wasn't enough to only handle the initial build. Maintaining integrations is often much more time consuming, and so we wanted to offer, like, a suite of integration, observability tools to ensure customer success and also make sure that someone else is going to be owning the maintenance of these integrations. Lastly, this is really always important to us. And sorry, Greg, because I'm sure you've heard this before, but security is really at our core. And so every single time we really talk about merge, we really want to make sure that everyone understands that security has always been important to us from day 1. Before we onboard a single customer, we got SOC 2, Type 2 certification, We quickly got ISO 27001. We are HIPAA compliant and g GDPR compliant as well. And great. I'm gonna hand this now to Greg to introduce us to Electric. Sure. Thank you. Yeah. At Electric, we help small and medium businesses manage their IT and security in house. Our software gets rid of that hassle and cost of traditional IT services, eliminating the the the ticket volume, having to subscribe for that, the service level agreements, the cost associated with managed service providers. We offer transparency and confidence. At electric, you get the tools you need to keep your IT reliable while you focus on your business. Fantastic. Thank you so much for that introduction. And believe you have a demo that will show us what the automated provisioning workflows look like. Would you be open to sharing a little bit more about why you needed these integrations in the first place? Yeah. I'm happy to. 1st, we we set out a goal that we wanted to connect to all major HRIS systems. And, to do that, if you if you think about our product, it's it's HR plus IT, and the combination of those 2 two things is really powerful. So by one, connecting all those systems was a pretty big undertaking. We had had experience with third party integrations and found it resource draining to maintain and really difficult for us to scale. So it would have been really taxing to take on these 60 plus HR systems, just kind of from a bespoke integration standpoint. We we have worked with an Ipass type of solution, and, you know, it was just not enough. It still required custom code. We still had to do the authentication management ourself. Simply did not solve a big enough problem, and it continued to limit scalability. So, did a bunch of research, and and that eventually led me to merge. Merge has HRS integrations we needed. It enabled us to, you know, open up the world, as you say, right after the right right from, go as soon as we integrated to your unified API one time. Well, thank you so much for sharing about that. I really appreciate it. Would you be open to sharing a little bit more about how everything has been going with Merged so far and some of the use cases for these integrations currently? Yeah. Happily. As I said, we it took us just a few weeks to integrate with Merged's unified API, enabling access to 60 plus integrations. We started out the door with the TriNet Velocity, Justworks, and BambooHR. They were very easy for us to go through just a validation process to make sure everything worked. So, yeah, going great from that standpoint. The the the the you know, what it enabled us to do since we wanna connect with these these resources is what we're talking about here is for for us and for HR partners, we care deeply about, you know, the devices getting to the new hires on time as they order them. And then at the end of employment of employment that that getting those users out of the systems completely. So those two things were inspired us to really lean into both employee onboarding and employee offboarding. Onboarding, which I'll demo later, is, as an incoming employee set up in HR that then gets sent to our system, that allows us to do application assignment. So the 3rd party applications that the employee will have access to, hardware purchasing. So so getting that laptop or desktop, purchased and shipped, and then immediately goes into our device management. And so we can manage everything, around security and the broader scope of making sure those devices are working well. And then further, we, you know, we we we treat that as asset management, enabling tracking, storing devices. And then when we get to, off boarding, eventually recovery. As if and as an employee leaves a business, that starts again with HR system that it is marked for end of employment and HR, sync to electric. And then we handle things like lock the device, wipe the device if selected, and then either and then doing a ship back kind of a QR code that we've worked out with shipping companies so that it's very easy to bring in a QR code either on your phone or a piece of printed paper and, put it in there and then and then have it shipped back to headquarters. So all of those things were really inspired us. That's really cool. A little bit off script, but what were you guys doing before merge? We were, we were more of a service company. We did a lot more. We had service desk, and a lot of the processes I just described were handled by people. Wow. Okay. That's so cool. I'm really excited that we're part of that company journey. Yeah. Well, I'd love to see a demo if you're open to it. Yeah. Let me let me start, demoing our product first by just going into an HR system. In this case, it's Bamboo. It's one that Mergent provided to us as a sandbox and and very it was immediately enabled for us. Let's go to people, and we'll we'll create a new employee to, do onboarding for. And I'll just, I'm not gonna hit everything here. I'm just gonna hit some important stuff that, that we can, you know, see that everything is working prop properly. Okay. I think that might be enough. Let's go ahead and save that. So what I've done is created, Jeanette Smith, an employee in, in Bamboo. We're gonna now it'll trigger the, the merge sync. It'll be synced to merge and then eventually sync to electric. We know it's in electric now because as an admin for the customer in electric, I received this welcome email on for a new employee onboarding for Jeanette Smith. So I'll bring that in and see that, you know, okay. I see it's an onboarding. Let's go ahead and equip that new hire, and then the cab comes up. And as you see, I was brought right into the new employee onboarding in electric. So this is in this demo, this is our first view of the electric product in the in our webinar. And you'll see that all the all the major fields have already been populated because they've been synced from, through merge. And so we have the the person's name, their personal email, their address, the start date, etcetera, their title. And then, you know so now we go into the onboarding. I mentioned this before. We're gonna onboard both applications and hardware. So go into it. Well, oops. Let's hit the next button. That'll have profoundly better, results. Try not to crack up during, a terrific day. In that employee group, that's an engineering group. This is one thing that we'll we'll be addressing, but probably by the time, within later this month that sync the group as well. So once we have the the employee group set, you'll see that all these applications are assigned to that group, and we do this inheritance thing where there's a master company group where, in this case, that group would get Slack and Zoom and and one password, some some really common company level tools. And then from engineering, of course, engineering needs Jira and access to Amazon Web Services and major data, all the the stuff they need to do their job. So that means the employee will now be associated with all those app and that we could do and that provisioning can happen. So now we're going into Jeanette Smith's company profile or user profile, if you will, and we see the application and say, oh, wait. Let's, let's go ahead and go to the hardware storefront so we can get that person some some new hardware. So let's see. As an engineering, my policy is all of our engineers get the best stuff. And so we'll we'll give them, a good h Mac Pro. We'll give them 27 inch screen. We'll give them a keyboard and a trackpad. Which are starting to Jeanette Smith. We'll come down here. Let's see if we can purchase a warranty. If we don't want it, we can see that the the order. You see that, we have the the address validation so that we don't, I guess, some of the shifts or missing thing. This, of course, from the demo is in my staging environment, so we can simply ignore adding the payment information. But here's where the customer would add their credit card if if they wanna keep one on file with us and then place the order. So now we have that order submitted, and that's that's all running pretty good. So what will happen, let's go look at our advice overview for a little bit. So I mentioned the first thing we did was onboarded the new employee into both the applications that employees can have access to and the hardware, getting that shipped. So once the employee see, receives their hard work, there is gonna be immediately into Electri's device management toolset. So we can see you know, right now we're saying, hey. There's one employee without a enrolled device. Obviously, that employee hasn't received it yet, so it's not yet enrolled. Sebastianette's piece there. We can see, how many devices are in use and how many are available. So we have this concept of asset tracking. So we can have, as an employee access, we can reclaim that hardware and and warehouse it for you or allow you to warehouse it yourself. Then we can see things like, hey. Some of my employees don't have enough disk space or their, firewall isn't turned on or, you know, encryption is a set. The when when this device became managed by electric, it's now under mobile device management. So, again, this is a staging environment. Things like encryption and gatekeeper and firewall, we're gonna we're gonna police that and man and manage that for you for the for the customer. For storage and RAM, those are very good things to say, oh, maybe I should consider, replacing Milton's hardware, getting with something newer. Obviously, Milton needs a bigger hard drive. Yeah. So, Shintzy, that is the demo of our product. Hope everybody enjoyed that. That's so cool. Thank you so much for showing me that. I love looking at other product demos and especially if it has an integration with Word even better. That was really, really cool. Thank you so much for walking through it, that with us. Cool. Awesome. So I was also curious. So from this project and going live with it, I was what are benefits that you've noticed from going with merge versus building this in house or not having the integrations at all? Yeah. Absolutely. I I can say the benefits in a few ways. Our saved cost saved and higher close rate. So from an hour save standpoint, again, it took us about 2 to 3 weeks to initially integrate with with your unified API, enabling 60 plus HRS systems, and we could connect there. So, you know, it's if in other words, without that unified API for merge, multiply 2 to 3 weeks by 60, and and that's the time savings. The and then further, obviously, we didn't build once and move on forever and ever. We've come back, and we've enhanced that those we've enhanced what we're doing with those systems. So the the good news is we only have to do that once as well. So, you know, it continues to 9 to 5 pay off for us in terms of engineering hours saved. From a cost save standpoint, merge gives us the same boxes we need for all of our validation testing. Even though we're using that any unified API, we're still looking at every, every h HRIS software and and just validating that end to end, it all comes together cleanly. And we really haven't had a miss that we're we're always going to do that. That that's just our responsibility to our customers. So, you know, those sandboxes have kept me from spending maybe tens of 1,000 annually on licenses for test accounts. And then most importantly, higher close rate. But by having all these HR systems as as our sales team talks to a new prospect and they hear about the, HR system of the day, they still get to say yes. And saying yes gets us to a close much quicker and and much higher rates. And, you know, that that's what we're here for in the first place. We love that. Thank you so much. I I'm glad that we have been able to work together, and electric was always one of those companies that it was always a dream logo of mine. So it's really exciting to see you guys now work with us. Awesome. So, first off, I wanted to thank you for your time. I know you're super, super busy and you didn't have to do this. So I really appreciate you coming here today, sharing a little bit more about what it was like to work with us, and also for just sharing this information with the audience broadly. I also wanted to open it up to questions from the audience if anyone has anything that we can help answer. It could be about Merged, Electrics experience, or really anything that's on your mind. Okay. We got a question. What is working with Merges post sales team like? Absolutely. You know, when we work as Merges post sales team, we're we're looking at, you know, technical help and and that kind of stuff and and another another of other things as well. You know, merge right away. As soon as we became a customer of merge, they set up a Slack channel with us. My engineers are in there. Our product product managers in there constantly. And, you know, the great news is that the response to our questions are fast, but my I feel like my engineering team never gets stuck. And so that that's been amazing. Then the call consultive area, and that's mainly around product strategy. How do how do we bring these integrated products to market? You know, what what new integration avenues might merge be offering that that can enable us in other ways? So all of that has has been, really pleasing as well. Cool. We got another question too. How many integrations does Smart Support? So we do offer 60 over 60 hourS integrations, but we also offer dozens of integrations or hundreds of integrations outside of that as well. So we have 7 different categories, HRIS, ATS, accounting, ticketing, CRM, file storage, and marketing automation with 2, incoming categories as well. So that I believe is around 210 as of yesterday, but we're always adding new integrations every week. And if you have any requests for additional integrations, we do add those free of charge. The only blocker is the Sandbox account, although we are always hunting for partnerships in the background. Okay. We got another question. So, does Electric have any additional use cases planned for Emerge? Yeah. There's one we've been talking to Emerge about and and continuing to keep on our on our road map to explore. That that's being able to work with a variety of different ticketing systems, IT service management tools. So less like a Jira service manager, ConnectWise, a number of different tools like that. So, you know, Merge offers that. We're we're exploring that, and I think that's on on our next horizon. Cool. Awesome. I think that's it. Thanks everyone for coming today. I really appreciate it. Hope you have a great rest of your week.