Client
South Florida’s Nanak’s Landscaping is a renowned full-service landscape company that provides grounds maintenance and major installations for Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Martin, and St. Lucie counties.
Challenge
Nanak’s was spending a great deal of time manually moving data between software systems. The process was time consuming and error prone and not scalable.
Project
Automate the process by which two of their software platforms pass information. Specifically, integrate their payroll software with their business management software (BMS) in the following ways:
- Push customer data from payroll system to BMS
(names, pay rates, etc) - Push pay data from BMS to payroll software
(employee IDs, pay components, hours, rates of pay, service codes) - Push pay burden to BMS from payroll system
Goals
- Eliminate the redundant and time-consuming task of moving data between systems
- Increase insight into data by providing extra layers such as service codes
- Increase accuracy by calculating burden rather than “guesstimating”
Solution
The three data transfers needed to be scheduled to execute on different, independent timelines, via Windows Task Scheduler. Initially, the data did not map cleanly between the systems. To remedy, when pulling data from the BMS, all in-scope data points were pulled from work tickets for a particular employee that were created during the designated time period and then aggregated before being sent to the payroll system. A local database was necessary to temporarily store data while it was summarized or otherwise transformed into the format needed for the recipient system. The database platform selected was SQL Server.
Outcome
The integration has given Nanak’s much better insight into their data and established the scalable process they needed to meet their rapid growth. Payroll processing time is a fraction of what it once was, and their data is more complete and timely than ever. With this in place, they are poised not only for organic growth but also to pursue acquisitions more confidently.