Deluxe Accelerates Onboarding: 10  Days Reduced to Minutes

Company Overview

Deluxe, a trusted leader in payments and data, connects millions of small businesses, thousands of financial institutions, and hundreds of the world’s leading brands with their customers and money through innovative technology and platform solutions. Its offerings help businesses pay, get paid, and grow, processing over $2 trillion in annual payment volume. Over the years, Deluxe has grown and transformed, resulting in a wide and deep tech stack that includes multiple development languages, frameworks, and databases. A key strategic focus for Deluxe is enhancing the developer experience to drive efficiency and innovation.

Challenges: Fragmented Tools and Slow Onboarding

Deluxe aimed to standardize its software development lifecycle (SDLC)  processes and improve developer productivity. However, they faced  significant hurdles: 

Lengthy Onboarding: Onboarding a new application, including setting  up repositories, implementing standards, and building pipelines, could  take up to 10 days. This delay impacted project timelines and developer  efficiency. 

Developer Toil: Developers spent excessive time on manual tasks and  navigating disparate tools and custom scripts for pipeline management.  

Lack of Standardization: The absence of a unified platform made it  difficult to enforce consistent policies, security standards, and best  practices across development teams.  

Suboptimal Developer Experience: The existing environment hindered a  streamlined developer experience, making it cumbersome to quickly  onboard, find resources, or troubleshoot applications effectively.

Solution: Harness IDP for a Streamlined Developer Experience

Deluxe recognized the need for a platform-centric approach to its SDLC and a  strong focus on improving the developer experience. Harness Internal  Developer Portal (IDP) emerged as the solution to address their key  challenges:

Centralized Service Catalog: Harness IDP provides a central place where all services are made available, simplifying discovery and access for developers.  

Accelerated Onboarding: Harness IDP dramatically reduced the time required to get developers and applications up and running.

Automation and Standardization: Harness IDP enables automation of  repetitive tasks, including project setup and potentially access requests,  through standardized templates. This aligns with the fintech company’s goal to create reusable templates for consistent workflows. 

“At a click of the button, code is migrated, and I also ensure that all the scanning, all the security management, everything is taken care of.“ - Satish  Balasubramanian, VP, Head of Architecture & Shared Services at Deluxe

‍Improved Developer Experience: The platform empowers developers by making onboarding, troubleshooting, and accessing necessary application information easier.

Results: Radically Reduced Onboarding Time and Enhanced Efficiency

The implementation of Harness Internal Developer Portal has already yielded significant improvements for Deluxe, with a clear path toward even greater efficiency:

Drastic Reduction in Onboarding Time: Application onboarding time has been significantly reduced from weeks to hours, sometimes even minutes.

“Onboarding used to take 5 to 10 days. Now with Harness IDP, project onboarding happens within a few minutes in certain areas.” - Vikas Mehta,  Enterprise Architect - Principal at Deluxe

Enhanced Developer Productivity: By automating onboarding and providing a centralized platform, developers can focus more on innovation and less on manual setup and toil.  

Improved Developer Experience: Developers now have a more streamlined and efficient way to start new projects and access services, directly addressing a key priority for Global FinTech Company.  

More results to come: Deluxe is exploring further automation of individual tasks through IDP, such as managing access to applications, aiming to reduce request fulfillment times from days to minutes. While still in the early stages of adoption for the broader Harness platform, Satish Balasubramanian says, “Deluxe aims for a 5% overall efficiency gain, with IDP being a key contributor to this goal.” 

Summary

"The alignment between Harness's platform-centric approach and our vision for an improved developer experience has been key to Global FinTech Company’s success.” - Satish Balasubramanian, VP, Head of Architecture &  Shared Services at Deluxe

Deluxe embarked on a journey to transform its developer experience and streamline its software delivery lifecycle. Faced with challenges of slow onboarding, developer toil, and a lack of standardization, the company turned to Harness Internal Developer Portal (IDP). By leveraging Harness IDP, Deluxe has dramatically reduced new application onboarding times from days to minutes, provided a centralized service catalog, and empowered its developers with a more efficient and satisfying experience.

This strategic implementation addressed immediate pain points and positioned Deluxe to achieve significant overall efficiency gains and foster a culture of innovation.

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