Project Summary and Client Background
Using
Kentico, Bit-Wizards built a custom intranet solution for Landrum's business systems so that they could more easily manage document transfer between their own employees, their clients, and also their client’s employees.
Landrum Professional Employer Services, a subsidiary of Landrum Human Resource Companies Inc., was ranked 13th in 2014 on the Staffing Industry Analysts’ 2014 list of largest Professional Employee Organizations (PEO) in the United States.
With over 10,000 employees and continuously acquiring and integrating new customers, companies, staff, and employees, Landrum is constantly challenged with the level of manual processing of customer and employee data, secure communications of sensitive data, and seamless integration of time entry, management, and other productivity tools necessary for efficient business operation.
With Landrum’s expected organizational growth and the highly competitive PEO market, the business tools, and processes of the organization need to be scaled to meet the needs and challenges of the market.
The Challenge
Currently, Landrum has licensed many different HR & Payroll systems. In many cases, the business tools they license contain redundant features from one product to the next. This redundancy of systems/features increases costs decreases productivity, complicates data management, and IT systems support and is often confusing to the client’s employees.
Landrum realized that they needed a single point of integration for all of their business systems tools so that they could more easily manage document transfer between their own employees, their clients, and also their client’s employees. What they have wouldn’t scale to meet their level of growth in the coming years. They chose Bit-Wizards to develop a custom solution that would connect their systems and assist them in properly investing in technology that would allow them to both streamline and scale their processes as they grow and acquire new businesses. They also felt that a custom solution would provide more value to their clients by offering features and flexibility that wasn’t attainable in an off-the-shelf commercial piece of software.
The Solution
Due to the unique nature of Landrum's business model, the out-of-the-box Kentico roles and permissions had to be extended and modified to allow for their specific business needs. The Bit-Wizards team had to become extremely familiar with Landrum’s business model to be able to architect and engineer a perfect solution.
Landrum’s business model is similar to the following: They convert a company’s existing workforce to become Landrum employees for HR and payroll purposes only. When this happens, the transitioned Landrum employees still perform their daily roles for their “real” employer. However, Landrum performs all administrative, human resources activities for the company, such payroll, personnel actions, retirement, etc.
Over the course of this 28-week project, the Bit-Wizards development team facilitated Landrum’s solution by engineering a secure portal called MyLandrum using the Kentico Platform Version 8.2, responsive design and development, and Microsoft MVC 5. This portal connects their current business systems and allows the Landrum employees and their customer's employees to share sensitive human resources documents by maximizing the flow of their current business processes.
When a user is set up in the MyLandrum portal, they are associated with one or more customer accounts, companies, and security roles which limit website access and capabilities based on business and security rules. These roles allow them to create documents and upload or download them securely.
When an employee needs to submit a document to HR or request a change of any kind, they simply log into the portal and choose the document type that they need to submit to Landrum. They fill in the necessary information and choose the appropriate department to send to and then they send the document. Once administration receives the document on the MyLandrum portal, a Landrum employee “takes ownership” of the document. The document sender sees that the request has been received and is being processed. Other members of the Landrum team in that department can see that someone has “taken ownership” of and is now taking action on that particular request (minimizing the need for multiple emails and miscommunication, thus streamlining their process). This functionality is also duplicated in the portal for the clients of Landrum and their employees.
In addition to the use of the portal, Landrum employees can send documents to non-Landrum clients and employees who do not have full access to the portal using email. They choose an email address and send a link to the other party that directs them to a location where they can then securely download the needed document.
Within this new portal, the Bit-Wizards team also built a notification system that is a “top-down” only system. This system allows the Landrum Administrative team to send the entire company necessary internal communications.
The Bit-Wizards development team has a high degree of skill coupled with a desire to solve our business problem with the right solution. Their goal from the very beginning was to help us reach our goals using technology. The relationship we have with the Bit-Wizards team is that of a technology partner and trusted advisor. We know that they have our best interests at heart, and we are excited to continue this long lasting relationship for future projects.
– Paul Randall, Senior Software Engineer, LandrumHR
The Result
The MyLandrum portal launched on March 28, 2016, and is a huge success for the Landrum team. The system has cut down substantially on the need to email numerous documents between internal Landrum employees and the Landrum client employees. The documents “status” indicators have also proven powerful in the maximizing the use of time and minimizing miscommunication for which employees should take action on which requests. Currently, the MyLandrum portal serves 700+ clients. And since its launch it has processed 9000 secure file uploads encompassing 40,000+ files and documents.