Opus helps restaurants train and engage their workforce by offering a platform where businesses can create training for their frontline to help increase productivity and stay compliant. Opus works with growing restaurants such as Wagamama, Sugarfish, Rick Bayless Tortazo. It has gained traction by offering a product tailored to the needs of a diverse restaurant workforce with support for over 100 languages.

Restaurants have a lot of staff turnover, even more so post-pandemic. As Jeff, Opus’s Co-founder and CTO, recalls his conversations with restaurant owners, "We ask 'how many people work at your company?' They laugh. They can't keep track day-to-day." In order to ensure that all new hires are trained on the right content and have access revoked when they leave, Opus needed a way to automate user provisioning and deprovisioning in their product. They looked to their customers' HRIS systems—UKG, ADP, Toast Payroll, HR Alliance, and more—for the data they needed.

However, Jeff did not have interest in building HRIS integrations. He notes that Opus "has a lean engineering team that has more important things to focus on than integrating with big payroll and HRIS systems.

Jeff kicked off a search for HRIS integrators and found "the most overlap between Merge's integration support and what we needed." Other products in the market had narrower HRIS integrations support and, according to Jeff, "a lot of the other Unified APIs focused on HRIS integrations that serve desk workers. That was just not what we needed." Several of these key integrations include 7shifts, ADP, Ceridian, Paychex, Paylocity, and UKG. With a broad set of support for the integrations that their customers need, the Opus team chose Merge rather than build in-house.

Opus became a Merge customer in 2022 and today supports integrations with 33 HRIS systems to offer employee onboarding and offboarding with the click of a button. Jeff describes three key features that these integrations support within Merge: 

• Driving user adoption: "It's critical to make sure that a restaurant manager knows who hasn't onboarded yet. Automatically onboarding users with HRIS data leads to much better product adoption, which is a key indicator of long-term retention."
• Provide the right training: "We make sure workers get training based on their location and role. A line cook at Naya in the Empire State Building needs a specific set of training. We use the Group and Employments Common Models in Merge to make this happen."‍
• Automating offboarding: "Given high turnover we need to also make the termination process seamless and instantly revoke access."

Integrations are an important part of the training solution that Opus offers. According to Jeff, "integrations are table stakes for our customers. Integrations are key; they help us close more deals and boost customer engagement."

Today more than 25% of Opus customers use an integration via Merge. In some cases, Opus customers don't have access to the HRIS systems of their franchisees, so Opus also supports direct file imports for these customers, though this approach doesn't provide the seamless and real-time experience of an HRIS integration through Merge.

Opus customers are blown away by the integration experience. Jeff recalls how one of their large customers "expected the HRIS integration with Ceridian was going to be a pain. With Merge the integration instantly linked and they said, 'Wow, that seems too good to be true.'" 

According to Jeff, "It's easy once they are set up." After customers link their HRIS systems, the Opus team validates the data and ensures that the intended data fields are mapped. "I want to think about HRIS as little as possible. I want it to just work for our customers. It saves us so much time. It is a huge win."