Portillo’s Serves Up Scalable Growth with Orchestration

Department

Human Resources and IT

Region

Chicago, Illinois

Industry

Retail, Hospitality, and Entertainment

About

Portillo’s is a fast-casual restaurant chain best known for its famous Chicago-style hot dogs, Italian beef sandwiches, and chocolate cake. With roots in classic street food, the company has grown into a beloved brand with a reputation for quality, speed, and consistency. As Portillo’s expands rapidly toward 100+ restaurants, technology and operational efficiency have become key drivers of its mission to deliver outstanding guest experiences.

Results

90%

faster user account setup — from 20 mins to under 2

Challenges

As Portillo's scaled, its IT team faced major challenges with employee account management and HR system processes. What started as a manageable process for a few hundred employees became overwhelming as the company grew to thousands of team members.

  • Manual user provisioning took ~20 minutes per person, straining a lean five-person help desk.
  • Rapid growth from 300 to 8,000 user accounts made manual processes unsustainable.
  • Legacy tools lacked scalability, flexibility, and raised security concerns.

Solutions

Portillo's selected Workato to replace its outdated middleware and streamline account management across its HR and IT systems. The platform’s scalability, ease of use, and ability to keep processes in-house were critical to the decision.

  • Automated onboarding, offboarding, and account setup through HCM–Azure integration.
  • Seamlessly moved from on-prem AD to cloud with secure, IT-controlled processes.
  • Extended automation into ITSM and vendor management workflows.

Impact

Workato has transformed how Portillo’s manages IT operations, freeing the help desk team from repetitive manual tasks and allowing them to focus on supporting restaurant operations and business growth.

  • Automation reduced user account setup from 20 minutes to just 1–2 minutes and eliminated HR ticket backlogs by running processes seamlessly in the background.
  • Time saved freed the IT team to focus on restaurant support and higher-value priorities instead of repetitive administrative tasks.
  • A scalable, future-ready environment now supports thousands of employees and provides flexibility to explore AI-driven optimizations and broader integrations.
  • 2,500% growth in accounts, with zero increase in headcount.

  • Freed a 5 person help desk from manual HR tasks, redirecting hours back to restaurant support.