Kendo UI Cost-effective Paperless Payroll

Challenge: Upgrading a Legacy Time and Attendance Application

Payroll shouldn’t be complicated. However, it can become convoluted if the application used to record time and attendance doesn’t meet company-specific requirements. IntelliTect was contracted by a company to upgrade their legacy time and attendance application to account for employees’ individual compensation and benefits accrual that varied depending on their changing daily shift responsibilities. IntelliTect developed a modernized, more accurate, and efficient replacement.

“It was an old application, built with old proprietary technology and running on an old server,” explained the company’s senior systems analyst. “We needed a robust solution that was flexible to meet our unique data requirements to process payroll with the complex earnings data we have to capture each shift for each employee.”

A thorough search yielded no off-the-shelf commercial time and attendance systems able to meet their unique constraints, so they set out to build a robust solution, flexible enough to handle the many conditions, data validations, exceptions, and rules essential to efficiently and accurately process payroll and meeting union reporting requirements.

Solution: Building on .NET Using Kendo UI Grids

The company chose IntelliTect to create a system to meet its unique needs. “We made the decision to build on .NET and when I came across Kendo UI grids, I knew I had found a UI that was robust enough and flexible enough to handle all of our changes,” the senior systems analyst said.  “And when I came across IntelliTect… the decision seemed serendipitous.”

IntelliTect worked with the company to complete the proof of concept within three weeks and finished work on the app three months later.

“We were asked to solve a very specific need that the company had with regards to a data entry application with very unique business logic,” explained Chris Finlayson, Senior Software Architect, IntelliTect Corporation. “The primary business challenge was to deliver an app that would be maintainable and cost-effectively handle changes.”

Finlayson said that he and the company’s senior systems analyst briefly considered a homegrown solution using Angular, but the amount of infrastructure the Kendo grids provided far outweighed the benefits of a homegrown solution.

Finlayson estimated that functionality allowed IntelliTect to develop the app in less than half the time compared to a homegrown solution.

Results: Kendo UI Develops High-Quality App

“With a 90-day development cycle using the Kendo UI, particularly the robust batch grids, we were able to develop a quality product, on time and within budget,” said the company’s senior systems analyst. “With this app, we improved data capture, automated previously inefficient processes, and created a solution designed to meet our needs moving forward with the flexibility to add functionality and modules as our business requirements dictate.”

Over the course of the project, many Telerik and Kendo UI attributes came into play. Finlayson specifically noted:

• Kendo UI powerful grid controls with custom events readily update values based on business rules on the data in the ERP system
• Out-of-the-box features that solved UI implementation needs, enabling the dev team to focus on business logic
• High-quality documentation with practical examples to jumpstart solutions
• Customer support that provided accurate and timely answers ― without fail

“There will be far less manual involvement interfacing with data from other systems to complete the process,” the company’s senior systems analyst said. End-users of the application, primarily payroll administrators, also benefited from built-in data entry enhancements that speed payroll processing.