About a year ago, Electric, an IT management software for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), pivoted their business to a SaaS-based product that supports SMBs. 

This product, which they refer to as their Electric IT Hub (or “Electric 2.0” internally), consists of a customer-specific IT Plan, a monitoring agent that’s added to employees’ desktops, mobile device management (MDM), asset management, security software, and tools to help manage applications.

The team at Electric knew that in order for prospects and customers to adopt their Electric IT Hub successfully, they needed to offer seamless integrations with customers’ HRIS solutions. 

Providing these integrations, however, wasn’t so straightforward. Electric had previously devoted an entire team of engineers to building and maintaining integrations with 3rd-party software, and they couldn’t afford to do the same with their HRIS integrations.

They’ve also tried using an embedded iPaaS solution, but the platform’s low-code approach came with its own set of issues. 

According to Greg Pellegrino, Electric’s VP of Engineering, “We decided not to use an embedded iPaaS’ workflows (for building HRIS integrations), as we wanted to use our own code to better control our integrations’ business logic. Moreover, an embedded iPaaS solution would force us to build this code for each integration we wanted to add. Merge, on the other hand, enables us to just build this code once for all the integrations we want to support.”

After researching Merge’s Unified API and suite of Integration Observability tooling, Greg knew he found the right fit for Electric.

Within a few weeks, Greg and his team were able to build to Merge’s HRIS Unified API and add 4 integrations to their product: TriNet, Paylocity, Justworks, and BambooHR.

Greg explains that “We could have easily added dozens of additional integrations through Merge, but we just want to gather initial user feedback to ensure the best possible customer experience.”

Through the integrations, the Electric IT Hub can support 3 in-product workflows:

• The initial sync: Once a customer adds an HRIS integration, employee data (first and last names, job titles, employment dates, and work emails) gets added to Electric. This then initiates a workflow where all of the employees receive an email with instructions to download Electric’s desktop app.

• Employee onboarding: Once a customer adds a new employee in their HRIS solution, that employee and their associated information get added to Electric. 

This kickstarts an employee onboarding workflow in Electric where an admin gets prompted to select the group the incoming employee should be added to (which determines the applications and devices they’d need), if they’re working remotely, etc. Based on these selections, Electric can go on to ship equipment to the new hire.

• Employee offboarding: Once a customer marks an employee as terminated in their HRIS solution, Electric kicks off the offboarding flow that the admin has defined in Electric. This can be generating a QR code for the employee (which they can use to return their equipment) and sending it to their email address; automatically wiping the employee’s devices by the end of their last day and allowing them to keep the equipment—and so on. 

By using Merge, Electric’s engineering team has been able to save countless time. 

Greg explains that, “Building each integration internally would take us 2 to 3 sprints. We built to Merge’s Unified API in the same amount of time and we can now access dozens of HRIS integrations. As a result, Merge has allowed our engineers to save hundreds of hours.”

Their team has also been able to bypass the process of establishing partnerships with various HRIS providers, which can be time-intensive for their partnerships team and drag out for an extended period. “Merge provides our team with the HRIS solutions’ sandbox environments, which enables us to avoid forming expensive partnerships and allows us to test integrations successfully,” explains Greg.

Finally, since Electric can easily turn on specific HRIS integrations through Merge, their sales reps can say “yes” when prospects ask whether they can integrate with their HRIS solution. The sales rep can even show how easy the initial set up is during their demo (via Merge Link), making the prospect even more excited about Electric. 

So, what’s next in Electric’s integration journey?

“Merge can connect to all of the ITSM solutions we’re interested in, so we’re exploring the possibility of leveraging Merge to add those integrations.” 

Given the experience Greg and his team have had so far with Merge, we’re confident that they’ll experience similar success with Merge’s Ticketing Unified API.