Businesses in APAC are increasingly prioritizing digital transformation to power growth.
In 2019, APAC businesses spent close to US$380 billion on tech and services that enable digital transformation, according to market research company IDC. Despite a general decline in spend due to the pandemic, demand for technology that directly impact business continuity—videoconferencing, cloud computing, and task automation—remained strong.
To better understand how businesses are leveraging automation technologies to scale growth, we checked in with eight of our customers in APAC to understand their digital transformation challenges, what they look for in an enterprise automation platform, and how automation has helped them grow the business.
What’s driving digital transformation for our APAC customers?
A key driver for these businesses is realizing that they have too many siloed, manual processes and in turn, recognizing that they are spending too much time on building and maintaining custom-coded solutions for these processes.
After all, there are thousands of business processes spanning all functions within the business that keep a company running daily. Just imagine writing, testing, implementing, and maintaining custom-coded solutions for all these processes—not just a sizable undertaking for a single IT department, but also not particularly cost-effective either, as it requires specialists that can be expensive or difficult to find. And as the reliance on IT grows, the number of tasks begin to accumulate. This inevitably leads to longer time-to-market and difficulty in scaling.
Some of these companies might also have existing legacy systems, which can be a hurdle for successful digital transformation. Aside from issues around updating and maintaining these systems, integrating them with other cloud or SaaS solutions that are increasingly used in such companies can be cumbersome, or plain impossible in the process.
With time, cost, and resources forming barriers to the construction of efficient business workflows, APAC businesses are turning to enterprise automation to scale automation efforts and power their digital transformation journey.
What do APAC businesses look for in an integration and automation tool?
The ability to implement integrations fast, and having the agility to make changes to existing integrations were the key criteria for businesses looking for an integration and automation tool to drive transformations.
In fact, all of our customers ranked fast implementation of integrations as ‘extremely important’, for a simple reason—moving fast is key to survival. With business processes constantly being changed and improved upon, businesses that are able to reduce development time of integrations and automations would have a clear advantage over slower movers.
The tool also had to enable more integrators and automators within the business. Low/no-code tools are increasingly popular especially among businesses that want to move faster, as these tools empower business technologists to ideate and execute their own automated workflows across applications, without having to be completely dependent on developers on the IT team.
Low/no-code tools also help to facilitate collaboration between IT and business—also something our customers found important. With these tools enabling business users to take over most of the work involved in designing and building workflows, and IT taking up an advisory role, companies can quickly capitalize on business opportunities that emerge.
Why did our APAC customers choose Workato?
A recent Gartner Peer Insights report showed that Workato was the top choice of APAC customers in the Enterprise iPaaS category. In fact, 97% of users worldwide indicated that they would recommend Workato.
Overwhelmingly, our customers have reflected that using Workato has improved efficiency and productivity throughout the business.
An immediate benefit of deploying automation was the elimination of low-value work that used to be handled manually. Data collection, approvals, and other admin tasks are repetitive busywork and easy to automate. By recovering the time previously lost to manual work, employees now have more time for high-value work. This also meant enhanced employee experience now that tedious, manual tasks are eliminated.
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Our customers also saw quicker wins with Workato.
“It took just one month from the time Mazrica (a Japanese Workato partner) introduced Workato, to us going live with integrations between Senses, Tableau, and freee. The barriers to implementation were low and we found Workato a highly versatile tool that we could use for automating other business processes as well.”
– Ryohei Banba, Corporate Planning Division Manager, Material Group
Faster deployment of integrations and automations means businesses have a competitive advantage, as they are able to react faster to changes and always stay one step ahead. Plus, half of our customers saw a return on investment in just 3-6 months of using Workato. Tokopedia, an eCommerce company based in Indonesia, saw ROI in just 3 months, and have since expanded their use of Workato.
For more stats from our survey, download the infographic.
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