CASE - Hummingbird HRM

From an in-house custom platform to the Akyla

Akyla is a stable and proven product for the staffing industry. It was a logical choice. Especially with the time interpretation allows us to ensure compliancy.

Improving the customer experience with IT

Since 1994, Kolibrie HRM has been the payroll specialist for the hospitality industry. In 2018, they decided to develop their own process automation platform with the aim of making the hospitality employee and entrepreneur more carefree. After three busy years, they still decide to pull the plug on their own developments and initiate the migration to our platform. The goal: to serve customers and temps even better, in full compliance with all laws and regulations.

An old acquaintance

Kolibrie HRM is no stranger to us. The moment they decided to develop their own platform, they were already using our Time Capture. "At the time, in our view, that was still a fairly static time registration tool that lacked essential functionality for Kolibrie. We wanted to offer our customers more. Our biggest wish was an app for temps with an integration of hours, reservations and digital identification. Akyla did not offer that at that time." says Bob van Groeninge, IT manager at Kolibrie HRM.

Challenges in customization

Building the hours portal and onboarding is going reasonably well, but they soon run into problems. "In addition to the hours processing and onboarding, so many more challenges come up that in hindsight turn out not to have been thought through enough. Developing something yourself is great fun, but keeping it up and running is something else entirely. The party we worked with had no knowledge of the flex industry, so we had to explain everything. It became energy consuming to keep the product up to par. And in the process, an expensive business as well."

While working on their own platform, Bob stayed in touch. "There has still remained contact with Akyla. We haven't lost sight of each other. And then you do notice that the Akyla platform is made for the entire flex market. They quickly know what you're talking about. That has tremendous added value." Bob also sees how in recent years our platform has continued to develop into a full-fledged midoffice platform for onboarding, time processing and interpretation and automating other processes in the midoffice. Such as requesting sick leave.

Developing something yourself is great fun, but keeping it up and running is something completely different. With Akyla we have the best functionality and a partner with whom we can continue to develop.

The key to success

That realization causes them to decide to pull the plug on their own platform. In 2021, Bob makes a plan for the IT landscape of Hummingbird HRM; the basis for a new intensive cooperation with Akyla. A true partnership in which a commitment is expressed back and forth.

"e-UUR from Akyla is a stable and proven product for the flex industry. It was a logical choice. Especially with the collective bargaining unraveling, which we did not have in our system, it saves us a lot of time and in addition, it also allows us to ensure compliancy."

In addition to using all our standard features, Hummingbird is also betting on customization. "We are quite innovative and the goal of our partnership is to make the product even better together. We see the combination of Kolibrie's practical experience and Akyla's development experience as the key to success."

Focusing more on relationships than administrative controls

The automation effort will hopefully ensure that more and more administrative issues will be picked up by the system rather than by employees. "It's not that we want to work people out, but we want to pay more attention to our relationships on the front end instead of controls and repetitive actions on the back end."

If this all works out well, it will hopefully ensure that they will soon be able to double sales with the same amount of people.