How Santex used automation to produce 10X more integrations than comparable companies.

Sebastian Pereira, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Santex, had grown increasingly frustrated with Santex’s legacy integrations. Built using a hodgepodge of languages (Python, Java, etc.), it was difficult—and expensive—for Sebastian to find engineers willing to manage the integrations.

For example, if a developer that built and maintained an integration in Python left the company, Sebastian’s team had to scramble to fill that role. And that became even trickier if there wasn’t already an expert Python developer available at Santex.

At the same time, Sebastian knew that there was a lot of unnecessary manual work happening within the company. He saw huge potential for Santex to automate some of the processes involved in finance and recruiting in order to save time, which, in turn, could be directed toward higher priorities.

In order for the company to be able to scale and increase its level of innovation, Sebastian had to find a way to standardize his growing list of integrations and implement automation

Sebastian surveyed the market and narrowed his final list down to three platforms, including Workato. Workato immediately stood out to Sebastian for its fast integration development and long list of out-of-the-box connectors. Its on-premise agent was also particularly important to Sebastian’s team.

On top of that, Sebastian always looks for two things in an application: a thriving community around the application and dependable customer support. Remarkably, Workato had one of the best support teams that he’d ever encountered.

Assured in his selection of Workato, Sebastian implemented the automation platform and hit the ground running with experimentation. Every recipe the team created taught them something, and those learnings grew into new cases or caused them to cancel recipes that weren’t providing the expected value.

Additionally, Workato has helped Santex to test extremely fast. Sebastian states “Santex now has agility that wasn’t seen before in the company when it comes to innovation”.

Since implementing Workato, Sebastian has kick-started a variety of use cases. One is a billing use case, which integrates a module that the team created in Salesforce with Quickbooks in order to manage worked and billable hours, sales commissions, costs, and revenue.

Since Santex’s primary revenue model is selling engineering hours, this integration serves a core function of their business. The team can now create these reports with more confidence, more complexity, and at a faster rate.

Workato has also enabled Santex to increase their rate of NPS surveys. A simple command in Slack prompts Workato to send out NPS surveys to clients, which are later logged in Santex’s MySQL database. Now, Santex employees have a more accurate, up-to-date pulse on customer satisfaction.

Looking ahead, Sebastian has begun building an “external recruiting” project, or integrating Santex with recruiting agencies through Greenhouse. Workato will alert Santex when candidates have taken specific actions in order to increase proactivity and improve Santex’s candidate-to-close ratio.

Sebastian realized just how far he’d come with Workato when he talked to a similar company—their goal was building one to two integrations for the year, and Sebastian already had 10. Additionally, it has been much more cost-effective to pay for Workato vs. paying new developers.