Accountor is a fast-growing company specializing in software solutions and outsourcing services for financial and HR services. The group employs about 2.200 experts in six countries. Accountor HR Solutions is a part of the group that develops HR software solutions.

Eficode has helped Accountor HR Solutions unify its product portfolio and move towards its ambitious Vision 2025 in software development. The project has encompassed, e.g., a situation assessment, development of test automation, streamlining operations, unifying access management, increasing visibility throughout, and removing siloes.

The challenge: unifying the portfolio and operations for Vision 2025

Accountor HR Solutions has grown rapidly both organically and through acquisitions. Acquisitions have helped the company assemble a comprehensive application portfolio, but, at the same time, the codebases, ways of working, and tools used have multiplied.

Accountor launched Vision 2025 in 2020 to unify the separate applications into a single product family and offer all the solutions as SaaS services. This makes it easier for customers to acquire Accountor products and get even more value from them.

As a part of the project, Accountor also aims to take all its systems from on-premises to the cloud and transform customer-specific solutions into a shared solution portfolio.

The undertaking is ambitious as there are numerous products and the ways of working and development processes around them are rather diverse.

The solution: transforming technology to move towards business transformation

Accountor’s original urgent need was the development of test automation to increase efficiency. After the test automation phase, Accountor and Eficode decided the cooperation was working well. They decided to continue the work with a systematic DevOps assessment, which helped the companies to create a plan of action to unify and modernize ways of working and toolsets to increase the efficiency of Accountor’s development.

Deploying the Eficode ROOT service was critical to creating unity. It allows Accountor to focus on the essentials and speed up their time-to-market.  Eficode ROOT offers more than 40 tools for all phases of the DevOps process. The tools are always available and up-to-date, and the organization can manage all users of the DevOps tools from one place.

Eficode ROOT brought together a uniform toolset for product development and the latest information about best practices and tools for the Accountor development team. This way, product development improved its focus, consolidated its working methods, and sped up product launches.

The Eficode ROOT service was complemented by a shared version control system, test automation, and shared reference architectures that further accelerated and unified processes. 

One significant development was the streamlining of ticket management. Earlier, customer service agents did not have sufficient visibility into how the correction of issues reported by customers was progressing, which led to unnecessary extra work and slowing down of problem resolution.

“The massive tool transformation created by this project has created the foundation for the business transformation we need to bring Vision 2025 to fruition,” comments the Director of Product Development at Accountor HR Solutions, Mr. Heikki Tukiainen.

The results: Vision-enabling transformation, unity, visibility, and efficiency

With the support of Eficode, Accountor has been able to shift the focus of its product development from managing technical debt to developing a new, unified Mepco product family and realizing the SaaS vision essential to ensuring Accountor’s future growth.

Eficode has helped make Accountor’s working methods and tools more uniform, the development process has become more transparent, and product development efficiency has increased significantly.

In addition to tools, Eficode has trained Accountor developers in using Atlassian Jira tools and helped Eficode create an internal DevOps center of excellence, which acts as a centralized clearinghouse of new tools and processes for the entire organization.

The Director of Product Development, Heikki Tukiainen continues: “We had accumulated a group of the leading products in the industry, and this led to the leadership to envision creating a unified product family which would be greater than the sum of its parts. To realize this vision, we needed a new way of working, which would not have been possible without the new tools and the support from Eficode. The new DevOps toolset and creation of our internal center of excellence, in particular, enabled the cloud development we strive for. Additionally, a modern set of tools and methodologies is simply a must these days to recruit the best talent.”

Key results of the cooperation:

  • A tool transformation that enabled a business transformation
  • Unification of tools and development methods
  • Elimination of silos and improvement of transparency
  • Deployment of test automation
  • Acceleration of product development
  • Shifting of focus from managing technical debt to developing new products
  • Creation of a DevOps center of excellence