Noodles & Company Serves Up Savings with PeopleMatter and Mule iON

The Challenge: Integrate and Streamline the Hiring Process

After almost two decades in business, Noodles & Company recognized the need to streamline many of their administrative processes, in particular the hiring and on-boarding of employees, by significantly upgrading some of their systems. Because the restaurant industry includes high volumes of employees – across a wide spectrum of experience - who act as the “face” of the company, talent management processes are critical to driving operational efficiency, maintaining employee and guest satisfaction, and maintaining the brand identity.

Noodles was faced with an existing employee on-boarding process that relied on a number of disparate legacy systems and manual batch file uploads. To make matters worse, in this process, close to 50% of records would typically generate some kind of exception, due to data mismatches, human error or other reasons – requiring manual intervention to correct. Navigating all of these challenges often resulted in employees working late simply to process on-boarding paperwork.

“Our legacy systems and processes were cumbersome and resource intensive, proving to be a drain on the team,” explained Alison Meadows, HR Director for Noodles & Company. “In addition, the once-per-day batch update process was becoming inadequate for us to operate efficiently and effectively.”

The Solution: PeopleMatter, with Mule iON for integration

Noodles & Company decided to significantly upgrade its hiring and on-boarding processes, starting with the replacement of two of its legacy systems with PeopleMatter, a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) talent manage offering. The PeopleMatter HIRE™ module provides an easy-to-use applicant tracking and hiring solution specifically designed for the service industry. With PeopleMatter, Noodles would be able to improve and optimize its hiring processes, replacing some of its existing systems without increasing its IT staff or incurring additional costs.

One of the appealing features of PeopleMatter is its ability to easily integrate with Noodles’ other critical HR systems, including a back-end HR and payroll system called UltiPro, from Ultimate Software. This integration capability is made possible through PeopleMatter’s strategic partnership with MuleSoft and its Mule iON integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). Mule iON, and PeopleMatter offers an integration application (iApp) called iApp4Hire, enabling Noodles and other customers to easily integrate the PeopleMatter HIRE module with other HR and payroll systems, including: ADP, Ceridian, Workday, Paychex and UltiPro, providing automated entry of new hire information into payroll systems of record.

“We liked the fact that we were leveraging a packaged, tested integration, rather than reinventing the wheel,” said Meadows. “Even better, the Mule iON platform gives us flexibility to configure the integration to reflect our specific process needs, without needing to make changes to our back-end systems.”

An example where Mule iON’s flexibility shines is in the changing of Noodles’ job codes and descriptions. Adding, deleting, or changing jobs within a system of record like UltiPro can typically requires multiple changes to an integration file. With the Mule iON integration, it’s a simple update to a look-up table done by a non-technical user.

Additionally, the iApp allows for more sophisticated business logic above and beyond simple data synchronization. For instance, Noodles’ on-boarding process for re-hires looks slightly different than for a new hire. While a re-hire might generate an error requiring manual intervention in the old integration process, with Mule iON, this contingency is built right into the integration flow.

Mule iON enables real-time event-driven integration for Noodles. Now, all of the necessary systems are accurately updated within 10 minutes of a new hire, as opposed to once nightly in the old error-prone batch process.

“I see the major benefit of the SaaS/cloud model to be the flexibility and transparency that it gives us, without needing a lot of IT resources,” concluded Meadows. “With PeopleMatter and Mule iON, we are getting both the application and the integration delivered together as a seamless cloud service, letting us realize those benefits end to end.”