Ridgelinez Ltd. is a business consulting company that provides consulting services to support the whole digital transformation process by developing and executing business model/solution, business process architecture, business operation system, strategy, and ecosystem.
Customer Story
How Ridgelinez successfully integrated SaaS apps and scaled automations with Workato
I think Workato is an excellent product that allows people who are hesitant about IT, to intuitively use it and become familiar with IT. [Workato enables you] to understand the benefits that data integration and workflow automation can bring, to become more eager to adopt improvement strategies and new initiatives using IT, and through these experiences, to become more willing to be involved in the DX (digital transformation) world.
Challenges
- Bridging the gaps in data management
- Building an efficient IT infrastructure in-house
As Manager of the Technology Group in Ridgelinez Ltd., Mr Okubo provides DX consulting services to customers, and works with IT vendors and business companies on digital transformation projects.
In line with the company’s strategy of leveraging data to drive decision-making and task management processes, Mr Okubo and his team were tasked to build a holistic in-house IT infrastructure that leveraged and maximized the use of Ridgelinez’s operations data.
The initial plan involved manually syncing data between SaaS applications and leveraging ETL tools to upload / download data. However, this approach was highly inefficient, required additional maintenance work from the IT team, and resulted in lower data quality as it was prone to human errors. The data synchronization process was fragmented, causing delays in access to real-time data.
As a forward-looking company, Ridgelinez Ltd. also believed that it was critical to have an efficient IT infrastructure in order to better serve their customers and help their customers digitally transform their processes successfully.
Solutions
- Integrating their onboarding system with Slack and Outlook
- Integrating SAP® Concur®, Slack, and Azure to manage the expense approvals process
- Integrating Salesforce with their ordering system and Slack
Ridgelinez Ltd.’s IT team used Workato to integrate the company’s onboarding platform built in OutSystems, with Outlook and Slack.
Now, when a new candidate’s data is added / updated in OutSystems, Workato automatically sends a notification via Outlook and Slack with the candidate’s information, to the relevant team members and HR team.
The HR team no longer has to manually track new candidate data, and can now refocus their attention on communicating and responding to enquiries instead.
The company also used automations to manage the expense approvals process. When an employee submits an expense report via SAP® Concur®, Workato automatically screens the report for suspicious activities. If suspicious activity is detected, Workato automatically routes the report via Slack to a manager for review and manual approval. If no suspicious activity is detected, the expense report is automatically marked as approved in SAP® Concur®.
Ridgelinez Ltd.’s IT team is in the midst of implementing an AI-driven fraud detection tool, to better analyze data and automatically identify fraud risks easily.
In addition, this tool will evaluate employee’s expense data, assign a fraud risk score rating to each employee, and keep a record of fraud / risks trends for each employee.
Ridgelinez Ltd.’s IT team used Workato to integrate Salesforce with Slack and the company’s ordering platform built in OutSystems.
Now, when a sales opportunity is added / updated in Salesforce, Workato automatically fulfills the order in Outsystems. In addition, Workato automatically sends a notification via Slack with the opportunity information, to the relevant team members.
The IT team has further plans to expand this process by integrating several SaaS apps like Anaplan, SAP S/4HANA®, SAP® Concur® and Microsoft® Azure, to facilitate task assignment to the various stakeholders involved in the order fulfillment process.
Results
- Improved accuracy in management of fraud data
- Efficient expense approvals process
- Quicker time to implementation & go-live with integration (1 month)
- Real-time data synchronization
Since using Workato as an integrated platform for their automation projects, Ridgelinez Ltd. witnessed significant improvements in their operations processes, with reports of increased efficiency for its 370 employees across 5 departments–IT, Sales, HR, Risk Management, Finance–in the company.
With the Workato platform’s intuitive UI and UX, the time to develop and go-live with the implementations were also significantly reduced. Simple automation projects were completed within a few hours, while more complex projects, like the company’s expense approvals process, were completed within a month.
As a result, the company’s payback period on integrations was reduced to 8 months, and their estimated ROI over the next 3 years was increased to 211%.
Mr Okubo and his team’s ultimate goal is to leverage Workato as an orchestration layer for all of the SaaS apps that the company uses. They are in the midst of expanding their expense approvals process, by integrating an AI-driven fraud detection tool to better manage fraud risks. With this integration, they expect to witness significant time savings and cost savings on manpower.