How a project-based collaboration with ProMark evolved into a strategic partnership

Summary

ProMark is a leading Nordic vendor of Workforce Management solutions for time and absence management, employee scheduling and task management. Their solution helps companies optimise productivity and generate savings through intelligent resource scheduling while ensuring employees are paid correctly. ProMark serves more than 400 companies and over 300,000 daily users globally, primarily organisations with 100+ employees.

The collaboration between ProMark and Wirtek evolved from a project-based interaction to a dedicated team model and then into a strategic partnership over ten years. A joint venture development centre in Bucharest hosts a strong team of ProMark and Wirtek developers working closely together.

Initial challenge

ProMark’s development team maintained their main product built in Progress OpenEdge, but pressure to keep up with emerging technologies was high. They needed a team that understood the market, could update the graphical interface, add new functionalities based on end-user needs and create new client applications. Their back-end capabilities needed to be complemented by solid front-end skills.

Solution

The collaboration began in 2011 with a one-time project to improve ProPortal’s user experience using Telerik components in an ASP.NET application. The success led to a dedicated team, split into two projects: continuing work on ProPortal and developing another interface called ProPC.

• ProPortal team: transitioned from Telerik RAD to Telerik Kendo UI for jQuery, improving performance and laying the foundation for future functionalities.
• Second project: when ProPortal moved to new front-end and back-end frameworks, Wirtek supported the transition to Angular and other frameworks, resulting in a much smoother tool and faster loading speeds (three to four times faster).

ProPC success story — Wirtek architects partnered with ProMark developers to create ProPC, a Windows-based terminal in C# with powerful offline functionality for registrations via PC or tablet. ProPC enables offline use with data later synchronised with the server and remains widely used.

Ongoing collaboration

By 2016 ProMark had a seamless collaboration with their Wirtek team in Cluj and a Progress Development team from another provider in Bucharest. To diminish risks and create a safe environment for their back-end team, ProMark chose Wirtek to take over operations in Romania:

• Opening a new development centre in Bucharest; contract signed in early 2017, office opened by April.
• Growing ProMark’s team to 18 people: eight Progress developers, four front-end developers, four QAs and two DevOps engineers.
• Running annual internships to grow and retain Progress OpenEdge specialists, who are scarce.
• A successful DevOps internship leading to full-time hires; many current team members are former interns.

The combined team in Bucharest forged a strong partnership, with Wirtek handling recruiting, administration and employee development to keep the team stable and happy.

Results

Wirtek helped ProMark develop its product and evolve the relationship into a strategic partnership with a new development centre. Since 2017 teams have been working on rewriting and updating all products — a long-term process to improve UI/UX, security and loading speed. ProMark sees Wirtek as a partner they can rely on for technical advice, solutions, team management and administrative tasks.

About ProMark

ProMark’s Workforce Management solution builds on more than 40 years of knowledge from complex labour-market agreements. It provides real-time information on resource use and integrates with ERP and payroll systems. ProMark is headquartered in Denmark with subsidiaries in Sweden, Norway, the UK and Romania, serving more than 400 customers, 1,000 installations and over 300,000 daily users.