10x Faster, Robust Governance: How SafetyCulture Transforms Finance & RevOps with Workato

Rapid business growth led Bruce McClure and the Engineering team to seek out a partner that could scale with SafetyCulture’s global business. After seeing success with embedding Workato into the SafetyCulture platform, the company’s internal teams began asking: “How can we use Workato to connect and automate our own business processes?” 

The Engineering team’s point-to-point integrations required significant engineering effort to build and maintain. Engineers had to manually read APIs from one system and build something in-between to push data into another system. This is complex and amounts to weeks of engineering time that could be better spent on building new product features or exploring new technologies. 

They also had to think about reliability and security. Where should API keys be stored? Who should have access to them?

The engineering team needed to prioritise time on improving SafetyCulture’s product, but they also needed to orchestrate backend finance systems. Alex Milliner, who handled Finance Operations, shared that members of the Finance team were plugging gaps in the system, but they still needed to overcome the different silos that had developed. There were costly repercussions to delaying this. For instance, they needed to ensure that customers received detailed invoice information in a timely manner to avoid delayed payments. On the RevOps side, Alex didn’t want to run the risk of errors in quotes - it had to be accurate. It became critical for the team to reimagine how they configure, price, and quote on the Salesforce CPQ module.

As a fast-growing company, the choice was between hiring more developers, or building out a more scalable system.

So Bruce and Andrew from the Engineering team jointly evaluated Workato.

Bruce and Andrew were already familiar with using tools like Zapier, but wanted a separate system to orchestrate finance processes, especially with the need to have robust governance in place for sensitive finance data. They also needed to optimise the use of core engineering resources and securely empower other teams to build alongside them. Workato checked all those boxes. 

Bruce was impressed by Workato’s array of smart pre-built integrations and universal connectors, API management capabilities allowing end-to-end lifecycle management of APIs, and Agentic AI capabilities. The intuitive visual interface allowed non-engineers to come onboard, too. The first use case swiftly provided a quick return on investment despite requiring minimal developer effort. They used Workato’s SAP-certified connector to orchestrate between their ERP system and product for the very first time. Invoices are now being automatically enriched with details that prompt customers to make payment more readily. This, in turn, improves SafetyCulture’s cash flow.

Alex shares that despite being a trained financial accountant - not an engineer -  Workato gives her all the tools needed to build automations. From the online courses to the way the user interface is built, she says “it’s really easy for non-technical users to grasp and understand.”

Echoing Alex’s views, Finance Operations Lead, Rowena, adds that the engineering team mentored her team to bring their ideas to life. They make full use of Workato’s Automation HQ governance model as an overarching control environment to oversee and manage these builds. This empowers Rowena to go beyond simple integrations and use Workato as a rapid prototyping tool to reimagine highly manual workflows that involve complex business logic, human decision making and exception handling. She’s able to compose a differentiated experience by weaving best-of-breed technologies in SafetyCulture’s application stack.

Meanwhile, in the RevOps space, Alex is using Workato to develop AI agentic solutions around Salesforce (i.e. CPQ Genie). She excitedly shares, “I really love how they’ve layered the recipes that I’ve learnt to develop and added AI on top. So it’s really easy to build and understand and it still has the same Workato principles that you’ve known and developed.”

In terms of speed, CIO Tim Litton notes that it used to take, on average, 3 to 6 months, for a few engineers to build a new solution from scratch. With Workato, SafetyCulture adopts a more logical process of evaluating new ideas by taking a couple of weeks to map out the process first, and then automate it in a week or less: 10 times faster than the previous lead time. The team is able to invest the time saved into priority work, like product innovation.

In terms of reliability and security, Workato securely manages SafetyCulture’s APIs and data, while providing full observability by default. Governance models like Automation HQ even allow Tim’s team to securely empower more builders across the business. Green shoots of automation are now spreading across SafetyCulture, with several more teams building recipes on Workato.

Workato is key to how SafetyCulture innovates and differentiates at every level. In Finance alone, the team is constantly introducing new features and commercial models for their customers. Workato is what they will use to automate, integrate and elevate these offerings into a seamless, end-to-end Enterprise Orchestration experience, complete with AI Agents and GenAI chatbots.