Collibra frees data from the constraint of silos by unifying data and AI governance across the entire ecosystem, regardless of source or compute engine. With more than 1,200 employees, the company has been recognized on the Forbes Cloud 100 list for its innovation in AI and governance. To sustain this innovation and ensure operational excellence across its expanding global footprint, Collibra’s Enterprise Architecture team turned to Workato to create an intelligent automation framework that streamlines workflows and strengthens every data and AI use case.
Challenge: Increasing complexity and data fragmentation
As Collibra scaled, the complexity of its operations increased dramatically. Critical business processes such as order-to-cash and data reconciliation between CRM and accounting systems relied heavily on manual execution, leading to inefficiencies, frequent data entry errors and limited visibility across teams. Despite the company’s technical sophistication, automation adoption was fragmented. Many business units viewed automation as a side project rather than a strategic enabler. IT was seen as the owner of automation, while non-technical users lacked confidence or the tools to build their own solutions. Executives were supportive in principle but hesitant to invest without tangible evidence of ROI. This combination of operational silos, uneven adoption and inconsistent governance made it difficult for Collibra to fully harness the potential of enterprise automation.
Solution: Community-driven intake process & Automation HQ
To address these challenges, Collibra adopted Workato’s platform to unify automation development, deployment and governance under one secure, scalable framework. Collibra’s team embraced a bottom-up evangelism strategy that empowered business users to participate in the automation journey. The cornerstone of this effort was the “Hire an Engineer” program, in which the IT team set aside time to coach non-technical employees through the process of building automations in Workato. This initiative demystified automation, built confidence among employees and created an ecosystem of citizen developers who could deliver incremental wins within their departments.
In parallel, Collibra established a community-driven intake process where any employee could submit automation ideas, socialize them across teams and identify overlapping needs. This approach turned automation from an IT-led initiative into a company-wide collaboration. To ensure governance, Collibra introduced “Automation HQ,” a distributed model where each business unit appointed “admin lights” or power users responsible for overseeing automations within their domain under IT supervision. The company’s first major success came from automating the order-to-cash process — integrating CRM and accounting data to eliminate manual handoffs. What once required hours of coordination was reduced to seconds, with real-time triggers ensuring 24/7 order processing across global time zones.
Impact: 120,000+ tasks automated every month, <1% failure rate
The results of Collibra’s automation transformation were measurable and far-reaching. The company achieved a 45% reduction in process cycle time across its core workflows, resulting in a more than 70% decrease in manual data entry errors. The automated order-to-cash process alone saved more than 8,000 labor hours annually, accelerating revenue recognition cycles by thirty percent. In total, Collibra now tracks over 120,000 automated tasks each month, with a failure rate of less than one percent. This is supported by a live ROI dashboard built in Workato, which displays savings, throughput and optimization opportunities in real-time.
Beyond operational efficiency, the cultural impact was equally significant. Automation became a shared responsibility rather than a departmental function. Teams across IT, finance, HR and operations collaborate through dedicated Slack channels and quarterly business reviews to identify new opportunities. The bottom-up model not only democratized automation but also embedded it into Collibra’s DNA as a driver of innovation and continuous improvement.
Reflecting on the transformation, Ankur Rathi summarized the journey: “We realized top-down evangelism wasn’t enough. By giving business users guardrails and confidence, we unlocked automation at scale. Workato helped us make automation visible, measurable and community-driven.”
Today, Collibra stands as a benchmark for how enterprises can align people, processes and technology to operationalize automation — not as a project, but as a sustainable cultural movement.
