Peachy chance to solve staff issues

Sunday Business Post - Recruitment page - Aug 9 2009

Read the article on the Sunday Business Post website by clicking here.

A Donegal company has developed an innovative online service to help companies to manage staff in different locations. Due to launch this month, Nvolve’s PeachyPeople.com website combines three tools for communication, training and people management.

Barry Harper, chief executive of Nvolve, said the product would appeal to companies with far-flung, mobile workers.

‘‘The whole concept of teleworking and the distributed workforce is very prominent at the moment,” Harper said. ‘‘Many companies are cutting costs and have people working from home. If companies want to grow, they have to go into Britain or Europe. Peachy People.com has been developed to meet these trends.”

Harper drew on his own personal experiences to design the Peachy Performer element of the site, which also includes Peachy Learner and PeachyConnect.

‘‘I used to be HR manager for Nortel in Galway,” he said. ‘‘We did an annual performance appraisal, which was seen as a form-filling exercise and just got over as quickly as possible.

‘‘With PeachyPeople.com, managers or individuals assign different objectives, which can be reviewed or updated every week or every month. Managers can run reports showing the progress of all outstanding objectives, giving an overall snapshot of how the business is performing.”

The Peachy Learner toolset helps employees to share knowledge more effectively. It also provides access to Nvolve’s e-learning products.

‘‘It allows users to share learning objects such as web links and reports, videos or webcasts, while also having a catalogue of 500 e-learning courses that users can take at any time,” Harper said.

Peachy Connect facilitates communication between employees with free peer-to-peer phone calls, video conferencing and online collaboration.

‘‘I can hit a couple of clicks and everyone gets an e-mail with the correct number to dial and the password to enter the teleconference,” Harper said. ‘‘If I want a web conference, it is the same - only everyone clicks on a URL. If I want to see your computer screen, I can.We can collaborate together on a document. It is all about saving people time, making them more productive.”

Harper launched a test version of PeachyPeople.com late last year, and was spurred on by the response it received.

‘‘It got picked up by some prominent blogs, and we now have over 500 companies registered - spread across retail, hospitality, professional services, finance, biotech and many others, including the Hilton Hotel Group, Fexco and Digiweb,” he said.

Peachy People is delivered using the software as a service (Saas) model, which means that it is accessed on internet browsers.

‘‘I am here in Donegal and you could be in America, but with SaaS it makes no difference,” Harper said. ‘‘The information is displayed extremely fast and your browser is turned into a desktop-like application.”

Users can access the basic package for free, while additional functionality is available to buy.

‘‘Every account gets 100MB of free storage space, but once people start using the application, they will generally need to purchase more storage space from us,” said Harper. ‘‘Twenty user web conferences are free, but if you want 50 users, there will be charges. The e-learning courses in the ‘knowledge bank’ element will be offered at a cost. Some companies may never need to move into the paying versions, however.”

Peachy People users are encouraged to provide feedback and suggest ideas to improve the service.

‘‘If users come to us and say they want a recruitment tool, then we will look to add that,” he said. ‘‘Eventually, the user community will determine the feature-set.”

Harper established Nvolve in 2006.The company has six staff at its headquarters in Letterkenny and 15 developers based in India. Recently shortlisted for the Small Firms Association’s Innovation Award, Nvolve has also received equity funding under Enterprise Ireland’s high performance startup scheme

‘‘We are looking at going to the market for venture capital funding later this year,” said Harper. ‘‘We already have companies registered from Germany, South Africa, Australia, South Korea and Japan. Our aim is over one million daily users within the next 12 months.”