In 2018, businesses will spend $1.3 trillion on digital transformation projects. At the same time, 70% of these initiatives will not reach their stated goals.
With over $900 billion in spending wasted, companies need to do better when it comes to digital transformation. One of the most important areas of improvement is teamwork. Businesses need to identify opportunities for better collaboration—and adopt technology that can enhance it.
“Unfortunately, most organizations are siloed, with functional areas and business units struggling to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate in relation to transformation initiatives,” says Steven Zobell, CPO/CTO of Workfront. “The diverse tools, data repositories, and workflows across disparate functions exacerbate enterprise disorganization, resulting in a work ecosystem that is largely analog and siloed. Substantial time is lost in the frustrating “shadow work” of trying to navigate the seams within and across silos while doing cross-team work.”
In order for businesses to achieve digital transformation, then, integration and automation need to be accessible to a wide variety of users within the enterprise.
But integration has historically been the domain of technical experts. Traditionally, enterprise-grade integrations tools have been unwieldy and difficult for laypeople to use, with steep learning curves.
At Workato, we’ve worked tirelessly to democratize integration to make intelligent automation more accessible. Our platform is all-in-one and doesn’t require any programming knowledge or a specialist; you can create integrated workflows using everyday English instructions, which we call recipes. Here are five stories of real-world companies that have used Workato to democratize integration and make greater productivity a reality for everyone!
Puppet: Enabling App Admins and Analysts to Automate Their Work
Puppet is a configuration automation software company with offices in 8 cities around the world. With more than 40,000 companies as clients—including more than 75% of the Fortune 100—it sets the standard for configuration and software lifecycle management.
Puppet continually seeks ways to refine its internal processes and make them more efficient, so agile automations are important across the company. Every department has systems and business processes that need to be optimized, and Workato allows Puppet’s Business Applications (BizApp) team to take ownership of their own automated workflows. This includes a Salesforce Administrator, Marketo Administrator, and Business Systems Analyst at Puppet who all participate in creating their own integrations in Workato without working with developers.
Read about how Puppet empowers lines-of-business users with Workato >
Ultimate Ears Pro: Building a Creative Marketing Funnel
As a Logitech subsidiary, Ultimate Ears Pro is the leading supplier of custom in-ear monitors for professional musicians. The company uses cutting-edge technology—such as 3D scans of the artist’s ears—to create custom, high-end earpieces.
Ultimate Ears Pro relies on a strong marketing funnel to convert prospects into customers. Jazmin Sandoval, Digital Marketing Manager for Ultimate Ears Pro, explains that using all their apps—including Zendesk—together is crucial to a seamless funnel. “We essentially operate like a startup within Logitech. We needed to configure Zendesk to work as our lead nurturing platform for the optimal visibility,” she says.
Sandoval used Workato to automate lead-to-cash workflows by connecting 6 marketing channels with Zendesk, providing a 360° view of each customer. She built several Workato automations that keep customer data clean and eliminate manual data entry by moving customer information from their landing page platform, eCommerce platform, email, live chat, database management system, and website into Zendesk. She also uses Workato to intelligently move and sort the customer information into the correct email lists in their email automation platform.
Sandoval says that the Workato platform gives Ultimate Ears the freedom to keep building integrations without a lot of technical know-how. The logic-based, self-explanatory recipes mean that she doesn’t have to depend on technical experts to create automated workflows. “I’m not a coder, but Workato gives me the freedom to build the integrations that I need,” she comments.
See Ultimate Ears Pro’s full story >
The Public Interest Network: Using Automation to Advance the Public Good
The Public Interest Network (TPIN) runs organizations committed to a vision of a better world, a set of core values, and a strategic approach to getting things done. TPIN conducts campaigns and outreach in all of the top 25 media markets and in 368 congressional districts, with the backing of 1.5 million supporters in all 50 states and Washington, DC.
Because many of its organizations are funded by ordinary citizens and small donor dollars, TPIN strives to maximize the return on those donations. The low-code revolution has made automation much more accessible to lean organizations, and TPIN took advantage of this shift to use automation to get more bang for the small donor buck.
Workato fit the bill perfectly. Today, TPIN has several pervasive integrations and automations via Workato across departments such as HR, finance, and donor relations. The automations, Sprague says, have made the overall employee experience much more enjoyable: “Ultimately, Workato takes tasks off of people’s plates, so they can spend their time on things that matter more.”
Explore how TPIN achieves their mission with intelligent automation >
Namely: Empowering An Admin To Integrate with Zero Code
Namely is the leading HR, payroll, and benefits platform for mid-sized companies. As a large organization, Namely relies on two core apps: JIRA functions as the hub for all developer activity, while Salesforce powers the rest of the team—from BizDev to customer service.
As the manager of systems administration and a Salesforce administrator, Cheryl Feldman wanted to facilitate better communication between the engineering team and the rest of the company so that all employees would be aware of key developments, like new product updates or ongoing problems.
Feldman knew she needed a two-way sync between JIRA and Salesforce to make this possible, but she also knew that dev time is a valuable commodity. She set out to complete this complex integration on her own—with no coding knowledge—by building her own Workato recipe.
“I found out about Workato from a webinar. They showed some integrations and I was like ‘Wow!’” she says. “The next day, I went to my boss and the engineering team because we were looking at another solution. I said, ‘There’s this thing called Workato and I think we can use it without any strain on engineering.’”
Feldman had the basic integration up and running in just one day. With all of the enhancements, she says, building the integration took about a week. For Namely, Workato’s flexibility is key; as a growing company, they need an integration tool that grows with them and is agile enough to allow for easy enhancement—with no code. “I built the JIRA-Salesforce integration myself,” Feldman comments, “and I can’t code at all. It’s really amazing to me.”
Read more about how Workato empowered admins at Namely >
#1 Multinational Energy Transportation Company: Adopting A Unified, Cloud-Native Platform to Democratize Integration
For a Global 500 energy infrastructure company with over 17,000 employees, some of the most critical workflows happen in the human resources (HR) department. This includes things like payroll, employee onboarding, and resource planning.
When faced with an influx of 6,000 new employees due to a merger, streamlining HR operations between the two organizations became a top priority. To successfully combine both organizations’ information and systems, they would need to do a lot of integration work, including extending a recently-deployed Workday solution.
Previously, the company had used several local integration brokers to handle these types of projects. But because the merger would require integration on a larger scale, they set out to find a more robust solution that could still accommodate the rapid adoption of SaaS products and a general shift to the cloud across the company. They also needed a tool that didn’t require months or years of training to use; they needed a solution that employees could pick up and use with minimal training.
After evaluating several vendors, the company narrowed the field to two potential tools. Workato ultimately prevailed due to its powerful platform and user-friendly interface. Primarily, the company plans to use Workato to integrate Workday with several instances of SAP. They will also use Workato to streamline their provisioning workflows and feed information into several systems, which include Salesplane for identity and access management (IAM), Photos, and ServiceNow—which will become their ERP.
“I asked Gartner and Forrester: what tool will democratize integration so that we’re not relying on a small group of people to build our integrations? Because when only a few people can build integrations, projects are placed in a queue. Getting them built can be a long and painful process. We wanted to find a product on the market that would allow your average IT developer and business analyst to actually do the integrations themselves with shorter time-to-value,” an Enterprise Architect at the company explains.
“Reducing the time between when we identify an integration need to the time we have it fulfilled is the big prize for me with Workato. We wanted an easy to use tool that an ad-hoc integrator can use to bring a requirement from concept to implementation in just a matter of days, with some guardrails to maintain quality,” he says.
