Client Overview

Founded in 2009, software development company GenUI had a shared and changing ownership of IT for many years. Although their team was full of tech experts, coordinating user setup and addressing IT issues consumed time that employees would otherwise be spending in collaboration and productivity for client projects. The process for bringing on a new employee involved communication with multiple parties and diligent tracking of tasks and milestones. Recently centralizing these duties to the Operations team meant almost a third of their time was dedicated to IT management, onboarding and offboarding in order to ensure a great associate experience. 

When the company shifted their workplace vision in 2020 during the uncertainty of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the Operations team knew their current approach to IT would need to become more dynamic and scalable. With a sudden transition from a lively in-office experience to a remote working environment, new challenges around onboarding and device management emerged. There were also plans to expand their recruiting candidate pool outside of Seattle in the coming years. Things like provisioning devices for employees, and keeping a record of device locations and owners could no longer be managed onsite. Operations Manager Laurie Meckling remarks, “As our company grew and changed, we wanted a stable partner to handle our consistent IT request demand, like on and offboarding, application usage and device management.” Along with consistency and stability, they also wanted an IT partner that understood the unique needs of their organization. “We wanted to find an IT partner who was like us, changing and growing alongside us, making an impact and on the cutting edge of technology.”

Upon signing, Electric worked to streamline processes that would positively affect the employee experience while also maintaining efficiency. First was providing easy visibility into all laptops and computers, something that quickly became more complicated during the transition to work-from-home. Where in the past, a quick walk through the office could provide the team visibility into company inventory, remote work made it difficult to know who had which devices, which was essential for their finance and internal teams. With a single pane of glass visibility into Electric-managed inventory, there were now easy-to-understand insights into device health and compliance. This newfound visibility allowed GenUI to conduct an audit of devices and renew the old ones, a project which typically increases employee productivity by 5-12%.

Along with revamping their device management, Electric laid down stable tools and resources related to onboarding, offboarding and IT troubleshooting, with average requests taking minutes to submit. Saving the Operations team the headache of device setup and coordination, Electric handled provisioning and procurement, shipping devices directly to their new employee’s doors. And when team members needed troubleshooting, approvals or access, Electric’s team of 100+ technicians were only a slack message away for support. This shift allowed Laurie to take on the management of IT support; “Technical knowledge is not my expertise, but that’s not an issue knowing I can rely on Electric to handle all of our support needs.”