Automations We Love: How a Leading Investment Firm Streamlines Due Diligence with Workday

Oct 31, 2018

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For a large enterprise, every business-critical process can be a complex balancing act. To do something like complete a project, for example, the organization must:

Allocate resources appropriately, including personnel
Facilitate collaboration between teams
Make sure that best practices and relevant regulations are followed
Track, store, and manage data–including unstructured data like documents or images

Making this all happen in a fast-paced enterprise environment can be challenging and tedious for the employees who must execute these complex (but necessary!) processes. This is a real pain point, as evidenced by the hundreds of apps and tools on the market created to manage micro-processes such as storing unstructured data, managing resources, and collaborating between teams. But working with many apps at once (and tracking processes that span those apps) can be a big drain on time and productivity. Moving data between apps manually can also increase mistakes—which can be catastrophic if you’re working with large sums of money or high-value customers. For the complex workflows that must be completed to get a project from start to finish, workflow automation is incredibly valuable. Not only does it allow you to automate individual tasks (like allocating staff) but it naturally moves your project forward, increasing the reliability that these tedious tasks are done to 100%. It makes your data more accurate, keeps you on track to meet deadlines, and increases employee satisfaction because they can focus on higher level activities. Here’s how a leading investment firm leverages intelligent automation to complete time-sensitive projects quickly while remaining compliant with their due diligence requirements.

Who? Since 1984, the world’s leading multi-asset investment firm has specialized in private equity, credit products, and venture capital investments. Today, the firm manages more than $75 billion in investor capital. What are they doing with Workato? Connecting several cloud apps and a database into a comprehensive due diligence workflow. The Challenge: The firm must complete extensive due diligence before an investment can commence. This requires working with several cloud apps (including Workday, ServiceNow, and Box) to allocate the appropriate resources and staffing. The Solution: When a new deal is logged in the firm’s Deal Sheet—which is stored in SQLServer—Workato creates a new deal in ServiceNow and a corresponding project in Workday. Workato also creates a resource plan for the project and a shared Box folder for all associated materials. The Results:

Can start the due diligence process much more quickly—as soon as a new deal is logged
Can seamlessly allocate appropriate resources in Workday
Can keep the project updated across all apps, with no manual data entry or lag time
The firm now leverages their cloud apps to the fullest, without expensive or time-consuming hardcoded integrations.

Orchestrating a Complex Due Diligence Process with Intelligent Automation

A leading investment firm, which handles over $75 billion in investor capital, needs to execute new investment projects efficiently, while remaining compliant and minimizing risk. Rigorous due diligence is a big part of the process; before an investment can begin, the firm must make sure all the proverbial boxes are checked off. This makes project management a lot more complicated. After new deals are initially logged in a Deal Sheet (which is stored in SQLServer), the firm needs to allocate the right resources (including personnel) to the deal in Workday. The firm also uses Salesforce to manage projects and ServiceNow to assign track individual tasks. To make due diligence more straightforward and start the process faster, the firm needed to connect these cloud-based apps into an automated workflow—without spending precious engineering resources on developing a custom, hard-coded solution.

Automatically Creating New Deals in ServiceNow and New Projects in Workday

When a new deal is logged in the firm’s Deal Sheet—which is stored in SQLServer—Workato creates a new deal in ServiceNow and a corresponding project in Workday. Workato then updates the Deal Sheet with this information. Related: 3 Workday automations that can save your HR team an immeasurable amount of time

Seamlessly Allocating Resources and Personnel in Workday

Next, Workato checks the deal’s information in SQLServer to see what resources or personnel it will require. Workato then creates a resource plan for the project within Workday.

Creating a Shared Box Folder for Project Collaboration

Finally, Workato creates a new Box folder for documentation related to the project. Workato then emails the folder link to all personnel allocated to the project in Workday and updates the corresponding Salesforce project. Salesforce is used to track the investors of the various deals. Sometimes investors are also partners and principals at the firm, so Workato cross-checks against Workday to make sure they get the right deal terms (like waiving investor fees etc).