Dealing with the elephant in our office

On May 12^th, we launched a milestone update to the Inclusion system code-named “Project Goliath”.  It was a lot of work, but resulted in some serious speed improvements and increased our future ability to scale.  To celebrate, we made a fun video of us “dealing with the elephant in the room” that we filmed during our launch celebration.  For a more in-depth look at Project Goliath, check out the article below.

As the name suggests, Goliath allowed the system to more efficiently handle larger client organizations, and improved our scalability to help us serve an increasing number of clients.  On a technical level, we re-wrote a significant amount of our software’s core code to improve its speed and efficiency.

Think of it like a pizzeria…  Our old system only sold full pizzas so every table had to order a full pie, even if they only wanted a slice.  This put a huge strain on the kitchen (our servers) and slowed down how quickly everyone could get their food.  Goliath introduced the ability to order by the slice.  By letting tables order only as much pizza (data) as they need, we’ve greatly improved our ability to handle peak hours effectively.  Now that our kitchen is no longer overworked, we can continue to expand and seat more tables without worrying about our kitchen slowing down.  So go ahead and order that large meat lovers – we can handle it no problem!

Why is this significant?  Goliath was a huge undertaking that we dedicated a lot of time and resources to pursuing.  Pay run creation and processing is now noticeably faster – between 10%-48% to be exact, and page view time also improved by 20%!  More importantly, the system will stay this way – regardless of how many additional users are added.  We’ve always believed in using client feedback to improve our system and Goliath represented this value.   Our users requested a faster system and we undertook a large project to satisfy the request.  Now that our core code has been fundamentally re-written, we are better able to focus on continuing to grow, improve, and add features with the confidence that our system can grow with us.  We are committed to listening to our users’ feedback to continually improve our system, and project Goliath was a milestone that represented this.