Workato

Fresenius faced significant challenges in managing and opening new dialysis centers and other physical locations. The RECS department, responsible for construction projects, operated separately from the rest of the company, using a disparate set of unconnected systems. This led to inefficiencies in the review and approval process, with no comprehensive view of project progress and forecasting models. The company needed to improve data management and streamline workflows to complete construction projects faster and provide better patient care. Additionally, approvals for each stage of a project were completed in an ad hoc manner across multiple systems and divisions, leading to unnecessary project delays. The ability to review data was inefficient, and dynamic reports were non-existent.

Goombal, a cloud application for event management, faced significant challenges in integrating with various external applications such as CRM systems, Salesforce, and marketing automation tools like Marketo. The development team had to build these integrations from scratch, which was time-consuming and costly. Integration was a critical component of their solution value, as customers required seamless connectivity with their existing systems. The need for speed, cost efficiency, and agility in the startup world made it imperative for Goombal to find a more efficient solution for integration.

Toast faced a challenge where their sales representatives used Salesforce while their support representatives used Zendesk. The existing standard connector lacked the customization options needed to meet Toast's specific workflows. This disconnection led to inefficiencies, as teams had to manually transfer data between systems, analyze it in Excel, and then re-enter it into another system. This process was time-consuming and prone to errors, causing delays in obtaining necessary reports and analyses. Toast needed a solution that could seamlessly integrate these systems to improve efficiency and reduce the time spent on manual data handling.

In 2018, businesses were projected to spend $1.3 trillion on digital transformation projects, yet 70% of these initiatives were not expected to reach their stated goals. This resulted in over $900 billion in wasted spending. A significant challenge was the lack of effective teamwork and collaboration within organizations, which were often siloed with disparate tools, data repositories, and workflows. This disorganization led to inefficiencies and a largely analog work ecosystem. To achieve successful digital transformation, businesses needed to make integration and automation accessible to a wide range of users within the enterprise. However, integration had traditionally been the domain of technical experts, with enterprise-grade integration tools being difficult for non-technical users to utilize.

Stanley Toh, Head of Enterprise End-user Services & Experience at Broadcom, anticipated that the company’s impending acquisitions would come with big operational challenges. A surge of new employees would require extensive onboarding tasks, such as assigning emails or setting up VPNs. Under existing ITSM systems, employee onboarding was inefficient, which meant that employees couldn’t be productive on day one. And employee offboarding was difficult to coordinate and execute accurately, which increased security risk. Stanley wanted to completely redesign these processes. There was also a “selfish” reason for zeroing in on this problem—Stanley and his team received many employee onboarding and offboarding-related complaints from the business. Stanley wanted to limit these complaints so that his team didn’t have to keep circling back to the same task. Stanley knew he couldn’t solve this problem with increased headcount. For one, he didn’t have the budget. But he also knew that the inevitable human error would only multiply as he added more and more employees. Instead, he wanted a solution that allowed his existing team to operate smarter.

Nutanix faced several challenges in its IT operations, primarily revolving around slow security ticket response, delayed VM provisioning, and increased security threat risk. The head of Cybersecurity, Sebastian, was responsible for managing service requests, provisioning virtual machines (VMs), and monitoring security. The existing system, which included ServiceNow for managing service requests, was not efficient enough as many requests sat in queues for extended periods. This inefficiency led to frustration among developers who had to wait a week for VM provisioning, resulting in lost productivity. Additionally, the security aspect was a significant concern, with a need to decentralize information and empower employees to manage security aspects like laptop configuration, VPN usage, and login data.

Marc Fenner, Director of Business Development at Box, faced a significant challenge in efficiently onboarding new partners to the Box Platform. Despite having numerous strategic partners ready to join, the existing onboarding process was cumbersome and time-consuming, involving multiple employees, numerous steps, and three different applications. This inefficiency left potential revenue and opportunities untapped, as the team struggled to keep up with the growing number of interested partners.

As Grab was experiencing hypergrowth, the company needed to ensure that its IT and People Operations processes were efficient and secure. The internal review revealed that many HR and IT processes, such as onboarding new hires and assigning IT systems, were highly manual. This manual nature led to duplicate work, increased the likelihood of human error, and was not productive for its people. The workflows spanned many enterprise apps like JumpCloud, their HRIS, and Slack, which necessitated a smarter infrastructure to handle these processes effectively.

Nextdoor faced significant challenges in its advertising management processes, which were crucial for its revenue generation. The company relied on three main applications: Placements.io, Google Ad Manager (GAM), and Salesforce, to manage advertisements. However, the lack of integration between Salesforce and GAM meant that ad metrics had to be manually uploaded into Salesforce weekly. This manual process delayed ad performance visibility for sales and accounting teams and risked inaccurate decision-making due to outdated reports. Additionally, the process of sending out invoices to clients was time-consuming, taking up to three days. Calculating client running balances was another resource-intensive task, requiring Nextdoor to potentially hire additional staff to manage it. Automating these processes was essential for Nextdoor to spur new revenue growth and free up engineering resources to focus on more complex product deliverables, thereby accelerating its product roadmap.

BioPak faced significant challenges in document processing due to its manual nature. The company, which manufactures sustainable packaging, had to process and manage a large volume of purchase order forms and invoices weekly. The sales team was responsible for manually processing at least 1,000 purchase orders each week, with each order taking up to 30 minutes to process. This manual process was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, leading to inefficiencies in operations. Jan Cerny, the Chief Technology Officer at BioPak, recognized the need for a more efficient solution to assist the sales team in handling document processing. The goal was to find a way to automate the process, reduce the time spent on each order, and allow the sales team to focus on more value-added tasks.

FREE NOW was experiencing a hyper growth phase, with approximately 60 new employees joining each month. This surge overwhelmed the engineering team, led by Kevin Schulze, Senior Solutions Architect, as they had to devote increased hours to the onboarding process. The existing Python-based processes required 34 hours to onboard a batch of new employees, which was not only time-consuming but also inflexible. Any changes to the onboarding/offboarding process would add significantly more time due to the rigidity of Python scripts. This situation diverted engineering resources away from revenue-driving projects and delayed getting new employees into a productive state.

As a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), Alcami deals with a lot of contracts. At any given time, these contracts vary in value—there is the initial awarded contract value, the amount “in process,” or the percentage of work that Alcami has scheduled to complete, and the invoiced value, or the total value of all completed work that can now be counted as revenue. These varying contract values are stored across two different systems: an ERP (Microsoft AX) and a CRM (Salesforce). In order to calculate the time between an awarded contract, a scheduled contract, or an invoiced contract, Alcami had no other option but to check between the two systems. Manually cross-referencing 1000+ contracts at any given time was slow and ineffective. Of the many different types of services that Alcami provides, the team could only analyze a small subset of their contracts. This left the team in the dark when trying to answer key questions like “What type of service contract are we completing the fastest?” or “How should we orient our sales strategy to maximize revenue?” There was a clear loss of clarity in revenue and business operations—Alcami needed a better solution.

Jeff Sutton, IT Manager at ChowNow, faced significant challenges with the company's manual employee onboarding and offboarding processes. These processes were not only time-consuming, taking about 45 minutes for onboarding and an hour for offboarding per employee, but they also posed security risks. The manual nature of these tasks left room for human error, such as failing to revoke access to tools and data when offboarding employees. This inefficiency was a bottleneck for the company's growth, as it required a substantial amount of time and resources that could be better spent on strategic initiatives. The challenge was to find a way to streamline these processes, reduce the time spent on them, and mitigate the associated security risks.

Ashik Ahmed, CEO, CTO & Co-Founder at Deputy, faced significant challenges in integrating various business-critical applications. The existing system required a lot of custom code, which was difficult to maintain and often led to data inconsistencies. This lack of synchronicity forced employees to perform manual cross-checking, such as customer service agents toggling between Salesforce and Intercom to gather customer details. Additionally, employee managers had to manually check Deputy to approve leave requests. The engineers at Deputy were responsible for managing these integrations, but Ashik wanted them to focus on product development instead. The business was eager to collaborate on integration projects but lacked the means to do so. Deputy's own product highlighted the importance of integration, as it needed to work seamlessly with multiple systems. Ashik saw an opportunity to streamline integrations and increase automation, which would allow the company to scale effectively and reduce resource strain.

Bill VanderWall, Malwarebytes Business Applications VP, faced significant challenges due to data silos within the company. Teams had to manually organize data for each project or request, leading to inefficiencies and a burden on staff. The finance and accounting functions were particularly affected, as information was siloed in disparate systems, resulting in a departmental approach to technology as the business scaled. High-volume tasks remained manual and burdensome, and the data warehouse did not collect all the necessary information to support hypergrowth. This situation hindered the ability to efficiently mine processes like contract renewals, software upgrades, and usage-based billing, which required excessive human interaction.

monday.com needed a solution to quickly launch internal business applications to address the needs of their fast-growing team. They required a platform that was easy to use, allowing them to train other team members efficiently. Additionally, they sought a solution with excellent customer service and quick response times. During their evaluation, they compared Workato with their existing solution and other alternatives. They conducted a proof of concept with Workato, finding it easy to understand and implement. The Workato team provided exceptional support, answering all questions promptly, which reinforced Workato's reputation for outstanding customer service.