Company Background
Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS) has been a champion for migrants and refugees from around the world for nearly 80 years. Its courageous and compassionate service has made a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who have sought safety and hope in America. LIRS has partnered with community-based legal and social service providers around the country to help over 500,000 migrants and refugees rebuild their lives in America.
The Problem – and The Solution
Over ten years ago, LIRS realized that the MS Access solution it was using wasn’t adequate. It needed both a system that could support its distributed office network, and a partner that had the expertise to handle the complicated data interface it had with the government. This led LIRS to hire Partners International (Partners) in 2014.
Partners provides software development services for LIRS and built two of its three main IT systems: a case management system and an integration tool. It also maintains a third system that was built by a previous vendor who went bankrupt several years ago.
“The quality of Partner’s software engineers is a big differentiating factor”, explains Patrick Nowlan, the IT Project Manager at LIRS. “Their engineers are very professional and very conscientious workers. That’s very unique and hard to find. Partners has also retained their software engineers for a long time – in fact, we’ve had the same three engineers since the start of our contract. Their knowledge of our business is quite valuable. In my experience, this level of long-term staff retention is very hard to do.”
A Great Partnership
LIRS says there are lots of reasons it has stayed with Partners for so long. One is that they know that Partners believes in their mission and wants to work for nonprofit organizations like them.
Nowlan also says that LIRS “couldn’t get engineers of that quality at the same rate that we get them from Partners”. “The reason we don’t hire internally,” Nowlan continues, “is that Partners vets the engineers, helps them develop professionally, and keeps them abreast of changes in technologies. These are things that LIRS would have a difficult time doing ourselves.”
Partners has earned LIRS’s trust by being reliable long-term partner. “I find the Partners team to be unusually capable and professional,” says Nowlan. “The people we work with are very conscientious and responsive, and that’s pretty rare.”