Customer success story
KTBLACK, paying people promptly and properly
A Texas staffing company ran payroll across Salesforce and Dynamics GP through a rigid XML link that would silently lock up. A failed record used to take days to fix. It now takes minutes, and payroll finishes on Thursday.
KTBLACK Services supplies skilled labour to employers across the United States, and payroll is one of the main services it sells. Pay data moved from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics GP over an XML process that was inflexible, slow and opaque: every new field needed the vendor to write code, and when it stalled, nobody could see why. Rapidi replaced it. IT staff add fields themselves, failed records are isolated and fixed in minutes, and a reverse flow from GP to Salesforce now carries electronic pay stubs the old process could never support.
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About KTBLACK Services
KTBLACK Services is a staffing company based in Texas that provides skilled labour to employers around the United States, with recruiters in several regional offices. Its subsidiaries are named for the niches they serve: Skilled Safety, KTB Medical, Skilled Trades, Skilled Energy and Skilled Technical. Its G.Boren Services division supplies security and event staff.
The company started with a small group of industry veterans who shared a view of what a skilled labour provider should be: create careers rather than fill revolving-door positions, hold more open and honest conversations between companies and candidates, and give both workers and clients more stability. More than a decade later it still holds itself to that, across many industries. More about the company at ktblack.com.
Why payroll is the hard part
Isaac Veliz, an IT Specialist at KTBLACK, describes payroll as one of the most burdensome tasks for a company that provides temporary staff: collecting timecards, verifying them, entering the data, calculating pay and deductions, and then actually paying the employee.
Payroll is not a back-office chore here, it is a service KTBLACK sells. It simplifies hiring a large number of people for a short time, to staff a convention or a festival. One of the company’s competitive advantages is flexibility in how contract employees get paid: paper cheques, pay cards or direct deposit.
From XML to Rapidi
KTBLACK has used Salesforce alongside Microsoft Dynamics GP for several years. Pay data moved from Salesforce into GP through an XML process. It worked, after a fashion, but it was inflexible: even a minor change, such as a new field in Salesforce, had to be programmed by the vendor.
The system would sometimes silently lock up, something that was often only discovered when someone entered something that was time critical, and realized that it wasn’t transferred to GP. We didn’t have any visibility into the problem, so our vendor would have to be called in to fix it, which could take a day or two. This held up our payroll team, who work in GP, and meant that instead of finishing the process on Friday, we would often have people working overtime on Saturday.
KTBLACK runs a heavily customised Salesforce, mostly on custom objects, and has customised GP significantly too. A cookie-cutter XML system could not carry all the data they wanted, because every change meant custom software. “The XML process was slow at the best of times,” Veliz says, “and adding a lot more information to the transfers would have made it unacceptable.”
So they looked for an alternative. Rapidi stood out for its custom integration capability, its ease of use and its visibility. Adding a new field is simple: you specify where in Salesforce the data comes from and where in GP it goes, or the reverse. It is straightforward enough that KTBLACK’s own IT staff make the changes.
When a transfer fails, perhaps because someone entered a date as 2218 instead of 2018, it is easy to isolate the record in question, fix it within minutes, and have the synchronization process continue.
Perfect data entry validation in both systems would be ideal, but until then some data accepted by Salesforce will be rejected by GP, and the other way round. Rapidi’s visibility makes the bad record quick to find and fix, and it also shows where validation itself could be improved.
Experiencing the benefits
The process is also simply faster.
Now our transfers are running consistently, they never get backlogged, and the data is always there when we need it.
Moving payroll from XML to Rapidi changed the working week. “Not only are we now not being forced to come in on Saturday to complete payroll,” Veliz reports, “but most of the process is completed on Thursday, with only late or problem records dealt with on Friday.”
Payroll runs on a weekly cycle. Employees submit timecards to their supervisor on Monday for the previous week, the payroll department has them by Wednesday at the latest, and the pay process starts on Thursday. Now it often finishes there too.
New capabilities coming
Rapidi has also opened a reverse flow, from GP back into Salesforce, carrying all the electronic pay stubs. Field employees will have what they need to answer questions about pay and help resolve problems, something the old XML transfer was never flexible enough to support. “We are excited for the benefits this pay stub visibility will bring us,” Veliz says.
KTBLACK worked closely with a Rapidi consultant through the integration. “Our Rapidi consultants were very responsive, and no matter what new transfer we asked them to perform, they always found a way to make it work. It really helps that they are not only experts at their own software, but also in Salesforce and GP.”
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Six pages: the XML process that locked up without telling anyone, the date typed as 2218, the Saturdays that stopped, and the pay stubs now flowing back from GP. Yours after one short form.
Advice for others
Asked what he would tell another company facing a multi-platform integration, Veliz does not hesitate to recommend Rapidi, and adds one thing to do first.
Before starting the integration it is important to sit down and define what you want the flow of information to be between your CRM and ERP, or other software. We did not have big data cleanup problems, because we had a previous integration solution, but if you are starting from scratch this is something you definitely need to consider.
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