Pure Consulting centralises employee services to accelerate work and retire their spreadsheets

About Pure

Pure Consulting fuses innovation together with expertise to deliver top-tier solutions in quality assurance, system development, and business operations. Their solutions are tailored to meet the unique needs of their clients, ensuring lasting impact and success.

Industry: Information technology and services
Number of employees: 51-200
Location: Sweden
Contacts: Alex Wahlroos, System Developer & Erik Skiöld

The homepage of Pure Consulting's employee portal, powered by Starhive.

Pure Consulting wanted to accelerate their internal processes

Pure Consulting is redefining what it means to be a consulting partner. With a strong focus on quality over quantity and attracting the top experts in their field, they provide digital innovation for their clients that make real, meaningful change. 

With a team of 70+ consultants that understand the value of improving internal processes, Pure Consulting’s attention naturally turned to refining their own processes. They needed a centralised employee portal where the team could access important information, tools, and services that help them quickly do their admin so they could spend more time supporting clients. More time spent with clients means more revenue for Pure, so increasing daily efficiency had a direct impact on their bottom line. 

Services that needed improved processes included salary administration, searching new job postings, and ordering Pure Consulting branded clothing for visits to client sites. They faced an issue where all the information required for these processes were scattered in different dozens of spreadsheets and documents that made it confusing and inefficient for employees trying to access services, and for the people administrating the services. 

For example, requesting branded clothing used to involve an Excel sheet that was pre-filled with all employees and then sent out by mail. Links in the sheet went to the different products on a separate website. After going through all the links individually, employees would complete the sheet with their order. 

But Pure Consulting also had to contend with differences between local versions of documents that then conflicted with the shared data. And with the same data needed for different services, such as employees, data was duplicated, quickly outdated, and they had no way to get an overall view of the data. 

They knew they needed to make things more efficient and they also wanted to plan for the future. Pure Consulting wanted a foundation for developing internal tools based on structured, shared data, rather than scattered systems. 

Building becomes faster with Starhive

For Pure Consulting, creating a solution that truly represented them and their brand was critical. They didn’t want an out-of-the-box employee portal with just their logo and brand colours added. They wanted a portal that lived and breathed their brand and that had a user experience tailored to their employees.

First they considered a fully self-developed solution and were assessing combining Heroku as the platform, Django as their framework, and a traditional database such as MongoDB as the backend. They liked this combination as they could get the flexibility and scalability they needed to handle the anticipated growth and complexity of their project as they added additional services in. 

However, they then discovered Starhive which they quickly realised would be faster to implement and provided the same flexibility, all while keeping within their budget. They liked Starhive’s data-first approach, which simplifies setting up the necessary data structure for an application. 

A side by side comparison of the user’s experience and the data stored in Starhive powering the branded clothing ordering system. 

Since employee experience and branding is very important to Pure Consulting, they decided to continue with developing their own frontend with React so they had complete control over the look and feel for both users and admins. They used Starhive as the backend, enabling significantly faster development than if they had used MongoDB. 

“Starhive’s robust API allows for smooth integration. And the flexibility to either interact directly with data within Starhive’s interface or use a custom frontend (or both) makes it adaptable to different use cases.”
- Alex Wahlroos

In this way, they could skip the database management and monitoring scalability, while retaining 100% control over the look and behaviour of their final employee portal. 

“Starhive’s ease of use allows for quickly transforming ideas into working applications with minimal development effort, thanks to its data-first approach and comprehensive feature set such as automations and robust querying.”
 - Alex Wahlroos

A new way of working for Pure Consulting

Pure Consulting’s new employee portal is now live and being used by the whole team. Early feedback is highly positive with employees praising its design and functionality. They confirmed that it makes planning their finances much clearer and easier, estimating it will save Pure Consulting hundreds of consultant hours annually in time reporting alone. For those on the administrative side, the new portal has helped streamline processes, automate previously manual tasks, and helped them deliver their internal employee services faster. 

A comparison of data stored in Starhive and the resulting frontend for assignment listings. 

Interestingly, the most significant impact has been how Pure Consulting approaches data-centric business processes. Starhive’s way of working with data–making it simple to view in different ways and view relationships between data entities–has sparked creativity and problem-solving in a new way. Inspiring them to solve other business problems with Starhive. 

“With the foundation in place in Starhive, it is easy to expand our portal with new features and capabilities. As the application grows, I believe we will save more time using Starhive, as Starhive is very easy to extend and modify.”
- Alex Wahlroos

The future

Pure Consulting now plans to implement more internal tools into their hybrid Starhive-custom frontend solution such as a CV generator for consultants. Instead of each employee saving their CV locally and manually tailoring it for each assignment, the tool will centralise skills, experience, and previous assignments, making it easier to match employees with new opportunities. It will also automatically generate tailored CVs by matching the skills needed. Saving yet more valuable consultant time that Pure Consulting can use to work more efficiently and increase their revenue.