Noodles & Company Uses Mule iON for SaaS, On-Premise Integration 
National fast food restaurant chain Noodles & Company is simplifying its hiring and on-boarding processes by integrating on-premise and SaaS systems with Mule iON integration-as-a-platform-service (iPaaS) and PeopleMatter, a cloud-based talent management SaaS. The cloud integration solution improves speed, accuracy and efficiencies for the chain’s HR systems.
National fast food restaurant chain Noodles & Company is simplifying its hiring and on-boarding processes by integrating on-premise and SaaS systems with the Mule iON integration-as-a-platform-service (iPaaS) and PeopleMatter, a cloud-based talent management SaaS.
As Noodles & Company grew, company execs realized they needed to upgrade their HR and talent management systems and processes, which at that time depended heavily on a mix of legacy systems and manual batch file uploads, according to Alison Meadows, Noodles & Company’s director of human resources.
Noodles & Company found that the combination of the PeopleMatter SaaS offerings and the MuleSoft iON iPaaS it is built on would enable better and more timely integration across critical cloud-based and on-premise HR-related systems, including ADP, Ceridian, Workday, Paychex, and UltiPro, she added.
“With PeopleMatter and MuleSoft iON, we are getting both the application and the integration delivered together as a seamless cloud service, letting us realize those benefits end-to-end,” Meadows said in a statement. “We like the fact that the integration is being provided by experts, rather than needing to reinvent the wheel ourselves,” iON and PeopleMatter will enable Noodles & Company to improve and streamline its hiring processes without hiring more IT staff or spending any additional money, she added.
Mule iON’s packaged integration capabilities can automatically update and synchronize employee data across multiple systems in real-time whenever a new employee is hired, rather than in batch or once a day. This was another crucial benefit, Meadows said, as fast food restaurants often hire and train an employee on the same day. Beyond speed, Mule iON also provides accuracy, she added, as errors and exceptions that can affect up to half of all manual entries are eliminated.
Using Mule iON and PeopleMatter, “Noodles has automated a relatively complex business process spanning multiple SaaS and legacy systems, all without needing to deploy [new] software or hire a team of developers,” said Chris Purpura, vice president and general manager of MuleSoft iON, in the statement.
Architecturally, MuleSoft iON brings together key PaaS technologies that simplify cloud integration projects, including orchestration, events exception handling, message routing and scalability, MuleSoft CTO and founder Ross Mason told IDN in an interview last year.
Other Mule iON iPaaS features include:
- A library of out-of-the-box cloud connectors to integrate with popular SaaS offerings, cloud services, and social media platforms
- For custom designs, allows devs to use familiar tools and workstyles to build and configure integration-style applications. Mule iON also works with MuleSoft’s just-released Mule Studio graphical dev kit
- For runtime, offers management tools to understand the performance of applications, monitor them and provide auditing and alerts
These features add up to benefits for end user SaaS adopters, but also for SaaS providers – cutting their cost and time-to-market, Mason added. The Mule iON PaaS architecture allows PeopleMatter to deliver multi-point integrations across the cloud and on-premise apps for HR, point-of-sale and payroll, and keep those services highly available.
“One our biggest challenge in on-boarding of customers is the integration of our service with our customers' existing systems," said Ken Haigh, COO of PeopleMatter. “Mule iON helps make it simple to deliver this integration, allowing our customers to focus on delivering the best service to their end customers rather than managing IT.”
