The team at Assembly—which provides a portfolio of HR solutions to help teams communicate, manage workflows, find information, and more—needed to integrate their platform with HRIS solutions to help clients automatically add and remove users from their product. 

Katya Bachrouche, a Principal Product Consultant at Assembly, explains that “Without the ability to add users to Assembly automatically, it would be extremely difficult to get our clients’ employees in and activated on our platform.”

They started by tasking their in-house engineers with building connections to ADP and BambooHR. The experience of building and maintaining these connections, however, proved to be anything but easy. 

“Each integration takes our engineers so long to build, and maintaining them takes even more time. Given that our new clients often used different HRIS solutions and wanted us to build integrations with them, we knew that our current approach wasn’t sustainable,” says Bachrouche.

Their team first evaluated Workato Embedded, but they found the solution’s implementation process to be too lengthy. They then came across Merge and immediately knew they found the right fit. “Merge offers so many HRIS integrations. Their HRIS Unified API was the only way we could meet our clients’ integration needs at scale,” explains Bachrouche.

Assembly connected to Merge’s HRIS Unified API within two weeks, which has allowed them to offer 30+ HRIS integrations. 

Through the integrations, Assembly can automatically populate user profiles and keep their fields up to date. Based on what’s populated and updated over time, Assembly can automatically share the appropriate documents, workflows, among other items, to each user. 

The team has also connected to Merge’s File Storage Unified API, which allows them to offer integrations with Box, SharePoint, Dropbox, and OneDrive. 

Using these integrations, clients can automatically add files into Assembly, which makes it easy for users to access everything they need within the platform. 

“Many of our users don’t upload their documents into Assembly, so the file storage integrations allow us to provide maximum coverage of users’ work materials. Plus, you only need one user to connect Assembly to their file storage platform and sync documents in order for colleagues (with the right access levels) to find them in Assembly. This makes our file storage integrations incredibly easy to adopt at scale,” adds Bachrouche.

The team at Assembly has also been able to power specific in-product use cases on top of these file storage integrations: 

Certain documents can automatically be put in a “Collection” (which allows users to organize Assembly-specific posts, workflows, tasks, people profiles, links, and files), which can then be shared out to specific team members; documents can be automatically included or linked to in specific workflows within Assembly (e.g. employee standups); and Assembly’s AI-powered search for their intranet solution (referred to as Dora AI) can read the files to provide direct responses to searches. For example, an employee can search “What’s my company’s paid time off policy?” and Assembly’s AI-powered search can provide a response based on the employer’s PTO documentation.

The HRIS and file storage integrations have benefited Assembly in a number of ways:

• Minimizing security risks: Employees and former employees can’t access information they shouldn’t see and are only part of workflows they’re meant to be included in. This ensures that sensitive documents are protected and that confidential information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. 

• Differentiated user experience: Assembly’s users can access all the documents they need without having to leave the platform; they don’t need to worry about manually adding, removing, or updating their users; and, using Assembly’s AI-powered search, they can get the insights they’re looking for quickly, easily, and independently.

• Time savings: Without Merge, building and maintaining all the integrations would take Assembly’s engineers an estimated 80 hours per week. 

• Supporting customers effectively: Assembly’s customer success (CS) team can use Merge’s dashboard to track any integration issues and identify the solutions for addressing them. This allows the team to provide prompt, effective support to clients, as well as minimize the impact of any issues. 

This also allows Assembly’s product and engineering teams to save additional time, according to Bachrouche. “Our product and engineering teams barely ever need to get involved when there are integration issues. Using Merge, our customer success managers can take on this work almost entirely on their own.” 

•  Unblocks sales opportunities: Almost every prospect needs Assembly to offer certain HRIS and file storage integrations. Now that they offer a broad set of integrations in both categories, they’ve seen a significant increase in their close rates. Jonathan Fields, the Co-Founder and CEO, would go so far as to say that “We definitely made back 10x what we invested in Merge.”

So, what’s Assembly’s next step in their integration journey?

They’re planning on investing in Merge’s Ticketing Unified API to help users track the status of specific tickets, add comments to them, edit their status, and more—all within Assembly. They’ll even allow users to access specific tickets and find the answers to ticket-specific questions via their intranet search.

Given all the success they’ve had so far, we’re confident that they’ll tackle this next step flawlessly.