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User Story - Merit Software

Keeping pace with an ever changing Payroll Industry

As a key provider of payroll software for the recruitment agencies and HR departments, Merit Software (formerly Clayton Associates) need to be able to develop flexible solutions quickly to meet customer's needs.

The companies Merit Payroll System is used by small and large organizations including Robert Walters Plc, Blue Arrow, The Locum Group and CashFriday, amongst others.

The Merit payroll system, is a simple-to-use application that runs on the recruitment agencies own PCs to effortlessly generate the payroll for temporary staff. Other functionality provided by the range includes candidate /vacancy / location matching for temping agencies, shift management functionality and automatic invoice production. The system integrates with other major selection and accountancy software packages.

The ourmerit.com payroll bureau service provides a second string to Merit Software's bow by offering clients an online, alternative to the PC-based version of the software. Its simplicity is such that bureau clients are required only to submit time sheets and Merit software manages the entire payroll service off-site. Merit Software maintains control of this large body of constantly changing data by using up-to-the minute application programming technology.

The problem
The temping industry is by nature fast-changing and subject to frequent legislative amendments that affect the information agencies and companies are required to retain. Managing the records of temporary staff is a problem for many businesses who find that they simply don't know how to store and access that information in a cost effective way. Systems specially designed to meet the different needs of various market sectors are becoming essential.

For recruitment agencies and departments running payroll applications for temporary staff, there is a real demand for software that can simultaneously manage staff records on an individual basis while responding to changes quickly, at short notice and without requiring major alterations to the database.

Merit Software appreciate that the delivery of such systems is largely dependent on the quality of the development environment. The data-intensive nature of its Merit products mean that they need to sit upon a database that can easily handle large numbers of records with no loss of performance as volumes increase. Typically, payroll applications are in constant use with the entering of timesheets, preparing of payroll runs or updating of candidate information, therefore speed and reliability are also of the essence.

The solution
Applications built on top of a database, such as a payroll, are naturally very data-reliant; this means the system's usability is dependent on the reliability and speed of the underpinning information repository. With this in mind, Merit Software decided that Revelation Software's OpenInsight, a suite of easy-to-use tools for developing sophisticated applications, provided the most suitable means for developing solutions to meet its customers prerequisites of being flexible, easily customizable, highly-scalable and above all cost effective. This decision was primarily based on the design technology's MultiValue database support.

As a result the database underpinning the Merit applications is a MultiValue database, rather than a traditional relational database, so instead of dozens or even hundreds of different tables storing information, there are only a few managing the same information more effectively. This makes it much quicker when the application is reading the tables and accessing information, resulting in significantly enhanced performance.

Furthermore, one of the key features of MultiValue/variable length development is that users are not limited to a specific number of lines of data in a table nor a certain number of characters when entering information into the database, for example a candidate's address. The result is that the MultiValue based system is far more user friendly and flexible to the needs of the company.

Such is the agility that the OpenInsight development environment gives in designing feature-rich software and services, Merit Software now uses it as standard throughout its entire organization, not just for customer solutions but also for its internal sales, development, training and support applications, even down to the call log!

Don Vaughan-Johnston, Senior Developer of Merit Software and founder of Clayton Associates, maintains overall responsibility for all in-house development and the long-term goals for the company and is an advocate of the OpenInsight method. "It is essential for us that we can develop products quickly and reliably to enable us to maintain our competitive advantage in the marketplace. We needed a solution that would allow us to vastly reduce our development cycles compared to other products on the market, whilst still giving us the flexibility our customers and the industry demand," said Don Vaughan-Johnston.

Thanks to the careful consideration given to its application development environment Don Vaughan-Johnston anticipates that Merit Software will be able to reap the rewards far into the future. "Our view is long-term," he explained. "We have been able to develop a range of solutions for our customers that not only meet their needs today, but that can be easily modified on demand to meet all their changing needs in the future, simply by building them upon flexible foundations."

Please contact us to discuss how OpenInsight can be used to benefit your business and to help you to maintain your competitive advantage.