Paylocity Develops Cross-Platform, Self-Service Payroll App in Half the Time with Progress
Since 1997, Paylocity’s mission has been to bring Payroll and Human resources out of the back office and into the boardroom. As technology and needs have advanced, Paylocity determined it was essential to create a mobile app for Employee Self-Service (ESS) to support the many employees that Paylocity helps manage for its clients. After comprehensive review of both traditional native coding or HTML5, the company settled on a combination of Kendo UI® by Progress and Telerik® Platform by Progress, a powerful duo that enabled Paylocity to reduce deployment time for the ground-breaking app by more than 50 percent.
Background
With a keen focus on technology and service, Paylocity brings Payroll and HR departments to the forefront of the enterprise, enabling organizations to achieve higher levels of productivity, employee engagement and socialization. Paylocity goes beyond basic payroll and human resource management functionality by adding unique tools to enable critical business insight and intelligence, allowing for better organizational decision making. Paylocity services thousands of businesses nationwide and has been named to the Inc. 5000 List of America’s fastest growing privately held companies eight times. Paylocity provides a unique set of cloud-based payroll and human resource solutions, accompanied by world-class service and support. The company offers a feature in the mobile app to solicit ongoing feedback from customers to maintain its high standards for service and innovation.
Challenge
By 2016, it is estimated that 80 percent of the U.S. population will use smartphones, and 50 percent will leverage tablet devices such as iPads. With the mobile revolution clearly here to stay, Paylocity quickly identified the need for a mobile app to help its employee self-service users access their critical payroll and HR information easily and on-the-go, regardless of their preferred device.
Paylocity evaluated whether to develop a traditional native mobile application, or take advantage of HTML5. Both approaches have distinct, and in some cases, unique benefits. Several factors influenced Paylocity’s customer-focused decision to use HTML5. First, the app needed to be developed quickly and leverage the current skill set of the Paylocity development team. Second, it needed to map to both existing and developing mobile application standards. This helped ensure the app would excel on the current generation of mobile devices, and also easily adapt to future form factors, accommodating the next-generation technology stack. The Paylocity application needed to work across multiple platforms. Since a native approach requires development of three separate apps, HTML5 wrapped in a native container and a single code base seemed to be the obvious choice. “We take great pride in our customer retention rates—the best in the industry. With more than 7,000 clients in our Payroll and HR application, we needed the mobile app to work perfectly out of the gate. If not, the ramifications would be palpable, to say the least. With very specific requirements outlined at the outset, we knew what needed to be done and it was imperative that we find a platform that could address all of our current and future needs,” said Chuck Cooper, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and CISO, Paylocity.
Solution
The Paylocity development team decided to leverage the capabilities of two Telerik Platform tools for its project: (1) Kendo UI suite and its combined JavaScript/HTML5 platform, and (2) Telerik Platform, the cloud-based solution for hybrid mobile app development.
“We’ve used Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET MVC by Progress in the past, to great success. While the company has historically been known for .NET development tools, when we heard about Telerik HTML5 and cross-platform capabilities available in Telerik Platform solution, it was an easy choice to make. In fact, I thought it was a pretty gutsy move to focus on cross-platform mobile development and applauded them for taking the risk,” said Cooper.
Paylocity developers have a high level of comfort and experience with Telerik tools and confidence in its support team. They are also impressed with its power and short learning curve. The Telerik Platform tools enabled the developer team to leverage its existing HTML5, CSS and JavaScript skills and experience, and allowed for a true multi platform development environment. For example, many of the developers had not previously programmed on a Mac, which in most development environments would make the creation of an iOS app difficult, if not impossible. Telerik Platform does not require use of specific hardware to create an application for any specific device or OS, enabling developers to develop for iOS on the platform of their choice.
Benefit
Through the use of Telerik Platform, Paylocity launched a mobile app for both Android AND iOS, that had the native look and feel they were hoping for, in less than half the time that it would have taken prior to using the solutions. The company plans to expand to both larger-format tablets and Windows Phone devices in the coming year. Paylocity believes that because of the minimal learning curve, future versions will be available to clients even faster than the first generation of its mobile solution.
“Leveraging the HTML5 capabilities of Kendo UI suite enabled us to get our app up and running in no time, with a clean, polished native look and feel. And while there’s debate as to whether we could have completed a native app in the same time period, Telerik Platform enabled us to deploy on multiple devices—something that would have taken more than twice as long to do with a native approach,” said Gordan Redzic, Director of Product Management, Paylocity.
With the new app, Paylocity customers can view their pay checks and request time off from a smart phone, freeing them from the desktop and office. It is a fully operational extension designed for the end user to augment and expand the benefits of its already successful online self-service solution.
Verdict
“At the outset, we were big on leveraging HTML5 in order to insulate ourselves a bit as technology advances and shifts over time,” said Cooper. “With Telerik Platform, we were able to leverage this technology and minimize time and resources to get our app up and running with ease. The feedback thus far has been positive and we are very pleased with the outcome. Because of our ongoing success with Telerik–whether leveraging its UI or cross-platform capabilities–we’re going to continue to expand that relationship whenever possible. In fact, we’re now considering other technologies within the Telerik portfolio for a social collaboration project. Yes, I’d say Telerik has been a strong partner for us—one that we’ll leverage well into the future.”