To bring our clients more value with cutting edge technologies, Celayix has decided to make the transition from our eTime desktop application to a new web front-end that will work on a variety of devices and drastically improve the mobile-friendly nature of our software.
In recent years, web technology has advanced, and more and more applications are moving to the web. Web applications have the advantage that they can be accessed from any device that has an internet connection and a browser. Mobile computing is also being used more than ever. Smartphone user penetration rate in North America has reached over 60%, and it is even higher in urban areas. It is also predicted that the rate will keep increasing in the following years. This means the overwhelming majority of the workforce has access to the web or mobile applications with no additional costs.
It is a little-known fact that our eTime software is written in a programming language called Progress 4GL (also known as OpenEdge ABL). Progress was originally chosen because it allows rapid development of desktop applications and it has a built-in relational database. This desktop solution has been the backbone of our employee scheduling software in the past. However, with the increasing demand for web and mobile technologies, we have decided that we should begin to build web interfaces for our scheduling software. Our desktop software could be made web-accessible as-is with a virtual desktop solution, but it was decided that that solution would be less convenient and more complicated for end users than building a web interface accessible from a web browser. The names of the new web application products are Team, Time, and Schedule, and they are written using the modern React JavaScript library.
With the mobile solution, accessibility and flexibility are improved. Employees can check their upcoming shifts, perform check in, check out and more tasks simply and with fewer clicks. Self-Scheduling reduces management’s scheduling hustle, while providing employees autonomy. Team members can also view and confirm their schedules, receive notification and acknowledge any shift changes. These flexibilities help balance employees’ life and work, enabling a happy and loyal work environment. The accessibility of it helps supervisors to stay informed with the most updated scheduling information from their staff.
All of our tools adopted a clean and straightforward user interface design to provide the most friendly user experiences. The robust program design considers the various user and industry-specific cases. Our software engineering team uses agile methodology to get end users involved in different phases of plan and delivery. Additionally, Celayix’s customer support team maintains a less than 30 minutes response rate to help clients at every stage of new tool adoption or transition.
