Challenges with the old system

PeriFerry used to use tools such as Google sheets to onboard and manage candidates, schedule interviews, manage training programs, in addition to managing prospective employer clients. As the number of candidates grew, manually managing records became a bottleneck.

The challenges in a nutshell:

1. Everything was manual.
2. Multiple, disparate tools used to solve only a part of the overall challenge.
3. Data reusability across these tools. Records had to be constantly copy-pasted between sheets and tools manually.
4. The manual data handling was slow and error prone.
5. Workflows such as scheduling interviews with candidates were tedious.
6. Managing files (resumes, documents etc.) alongside these records was complicated.

CRM tools in the market were expensive and tying together small, but many custom use cases into a coherent workflow was difficult, and again, expensive.

How FOSS United helped PeriFerry?

We worked with PeriFerry to understand their business workflows and associated pain points. We understood that their workflows were an overlap between a CRM and certain aspects of an ERP system. We suggested a small ERPNext implementation to port their manual workflows.

ERPNext (and Frappe, the underlying framework), is an open source ERP system that comes with hundreds of business workflows and thousands of business objects out of the box that can be cherry picked to solve specific organisational problems.

We deployed an ERPNext instance for PeriFerry (with cloud hosting sponsored by FrappeCloud) and worked with the project champions at PeriFerry to carefully port their workflows and data in stages. To begin with, we created a candidate onboarding workflow with forms, validations, lists, and reports. Creating such workflows are trivial in the no-code Frappe framework.

We worked with the PeriFerry team to train them on the UI and UX of the new system, and to strike the right balance between requirements and change management and the feasibility of implementation. Here, FOSS United’s and PeriFerry’s interactions with patience and mutual respect helped make the process smooth. PeriFerry assigning a competent project champion from their side helped significantly.

The PeriFerry team is now able to manage their candidate records, associated files and documents, and also create resumes for candidates with just a few clicks, all on a single, seamless UI. Moreover, the team is now able to implement changes and configure workflows on their own without external help using the no-code framework. The proactive project champion from the team ensured that this knowledge was transferred and put to practical use to attain a certain level of tech self-sufficiency. This happened over a course of six months.

PeriFerry now does candidate onboarding and management, training, and client (employers) management on their instance of ERPNext. The manual processes that would take several hours every day now take minutes.

Neelam Jain, Founder and CEO of PeriFerry writes:

"And so, we imbibed an absolutely new way of working this year. It was difficult at first, given the 'habit' of doing everything manually. The result? We now spend less than 20 mins per day on a process that consumed over 7 hours. And we're only getting started"