Montage Online celebrates 5 years

September 2018 marks an important milestone for Montage Online – we celebrate our 5-year anniversary of the first release of our game-changing Montage Online workflow engine.

Looking back, we designed our solution after spending most of our consulting careers saying ‘no’ to clients when they had a simple request for functionality or a great idea when we were implementing their HRIS software. We wanted to say ‘yes’ more! We also wanted to assist our customers move from paper to digital with an easy migration of their existing processes delivered online.

Initially we tried partnering with the leading workflow products in the market at the time but small customer changes were unnecessarily expensive. We soon realised most vendors in this space had old platforms and old technology.

So, we combined our experience in CRM and HRIS implementations with the aspiration to build a game changing modern web based platform that was extremely flexible and fast to configure. We were aiming at delivering agile, scalable results across organisations in a cost effective manner for our customers. The catch for our development team was it had to be able to be implemented by non-developers.

We achieved our “Minimum Viable Product” within four months. We believe good things can happen quickly, and we had our first client within two months of release. That client is still with us today, and we have together configured more than 25 individual business processes to streamline and support their growing organisation, while also interfacing with their financials and payroll applications.

Our solution was originally aimed at HR and Health and Safety managers who had a vision for a better world in their organisations, where technology aligned very closely to their strategy, values and culture, rather than them having to align to someone else’s approach to business process. A world that actually supports and encourages a process of continual improvement.

Now sales and marketing and finance visionaries have joined our band. We are now truly an enterprise-wide platform for growth, efficiencies and effectiveness accessed by computer, tablet or smart phone.

The work is rewarding as every client is different. Every project is different. But we continuously find great people to work with. They have become, as clichéd as it sounds, our family and our connected community as they like to talk to each other and share inspiration and ideas. They openly discuss their solution is optimal for them, even when not necessarily their neighbours which just confirms our belief that everyone is different.

Over the last five years, as Practice Lead and “sales guy” I have met with many people, scoped many high-level designs and I’ve been fortunate even to implement many systems.

Here are some of my highlights (in no particular order):

• The expense claim that incorporates Fringe Benefit Tax claims for staff with company vehicles.
• The system that has a ratio-driven calculation for randomly selecting staff for drug and alcohol tests across multiple sites based on the number of staff at each site.
• Enabling international sales managers in the horticulture sector to go to an event in Asia, and sign up customer purchase orders on tablets, with the customer receiving confirmation and the documentation via email immediately after signing.
• The ability to calculate the number of shifts a client will need, the roles involved, and then allocate and order. This is end-to-end labour allocation and scheduling solution. This has to be my favourite! 
• Completing Remuneration reviews online (no excel spreadsheets) using the data already stored in the onboarding system, and auto-generating the employee letters confirming the remuneration changes.
• Enabling the employment managers at orchards to quickly recruit their six-week, 300-strong seasonal workforce from an application pool of in excess of 4000. This includes electronic signing of employment documents, saving paper and a lot of time.
• Another favourite is the Performance Development Review process that incorporates a participant survey to gather feedback, so we can continue to improve the PDR process for our customers - the employees. We are on year 4 now!
• Another of our clients is very much driven by the Lean methodology. We always discuss the three-point plug… you can’t get it wrong. Hence our scoping sessions always return to this. They have a Kaizen process. An ‘A5’ process to capture and manage ideas for ‘good change’.

 

There are many more of these stories of what we have done in our Kiwi made software for our clients. All unique, often challenging but always delivered. One software platform with all your organisation’s people processes. 

Another highlight to our stealth-like growth story is that people are also using our software in Australia, the USA, Asia, Eastern Europe, and other countries soon.

Looking forward to the next five years, we have a lot more in our sights, and it involves continuing to enhance our platform so we can do more for our clients.

• Continually pushing boundaries and challenging ideologies.
• Bringing experiences from other industries and processes.
• I definitely hope for more left field dreams of being better.

Through innovation we deliver competitive advantage for our clients. Bring it on. We’d like to thank all our wonderful clients for their support and ideas, and look forward to continuing to work with you another 5 years!

I’ll leave you with a rather full list of processes we have delivered in Montage Online to date:

• Applicant tracking and onboarding
• Broadcasts
• Drug and alcohol testing management
• Expense claims including FBT
• Fatigue alerts
• Forecasting
• Get active reimbursements
• Global GAP compliance
• Hazard management
• Idea submissions for good change
• Incident management
• Leave requests
• Opportunity management
• Performance conversations/ development reviews/ development plans
• Purchase requests
• Recruitment business cases
• Remuneration reviews
• Sales quotes
• Shout awards
• Support requests
• Team scheduling
• Timesheets - daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly
• Training management
• Travel requests

Your processes, your way, a single employee portal! Your Montage… Online.