Exaktime: Continuous Innovation with Programmers

Learn how Programmers’ subsidiary Actminds helps Exaktime improve its products with strong digital practices and quickly ramp up development, allowing the company to focus on domain knowledge.

Mobile workforce management company ExakTime, which helps construction, field service, landscaping, transportation, event management, oil and gas, and mining companies maximize productivity with time-tracking tools and processes, enjoyed years of consistent growth. But that growth came with a price. As the company grew and took on more sizable clients, its IT department realized it could no longer remain nimble without offering access to its products from anywhere, anytime.

According to Wayne Wise, ExakTime’s Technology VP, “ExakTime’s marketing tagline is Mobile Workforce Management. What that really means is, we go in and replace paper timecards. 90% of our customers come from paper timecards, and that’s where we look to provide that point of digital transformation for them”.

“Some of the challenges we faced when we were on an on-prem solution, one, supporting customers were difficult. We didn’t have access to their database, so we would have to copy their database down to our environment to troubleshoot, to help resolve some of their issues. Also, getting customers to update their software packages on a regular basis was difficult” highlighted Jennifer Byrne, Senior Project Manager at ExakTime.

Digital Product Modernization: The Solution

“We needed to go to the cloud. The whole SaaS product, the SaaS model, to get deeper penetrations in the company. So, we started looking at providers. We had tried some other providers prior to coming to Microsoft, and we truly found our home when we found Azure. It was a spot that we were able to take our desktop product and lift and shift from this on-prem product and transition it into this great SaaS product called Time Summit Connect. And that model let us take it in stages, and we were able to focus on core components of transitioning from not only that on-prem model, but we had an on-prem hardware solution that we provided, that we hosted. And it let us transition both of those things at once with very low risk and very easily”, added Wayne.

Carlos Cardoso, Programmers’ Operations Manager, points out that “while ExakTime was initially skeptical of working with distributed teams, they quickly came to trust our expertise and technical skills. Today, we work side-by-side with the ExakTime team to expand their digital product portfolio and build valuable features for their users — allowing ExakTime to focus on the things that matter most to their growing business.

According to Jennifer, “Here at Exaktime since we’ve moved to Time Summit Connect and doing an cloud-based application our growth has been phenomenal. The amount of time it took us to get our customers in the first 10 years, we’ve got that many in a year and a half now, and we expect to double that in the next year”.