How Broadcom uses automation for multiple M&As, 90% of IT provisioning, & business-critical initiatives

Stanley Toh, Head of Enterprise End-user Services & Experience at Broadcom, anticipated that the company’s impending acquisitions would come with big operational challenges. A surge of new employees would require extensive onboarding tasks, such as assigning emails or setting up VPNs.

Under existing ITSM systems, employee onboarding was inefficient, which meant that employees couldn’t be productive on day one. And employee offboarding was difficult to coordinate and execute accurately, which increased security risk. Stanley wanted to completely redesign these processes.

There was also a “selfish” reason for zeroing in on this problem—Stanley and his team received many employee onboarding and offboarding-related complaints from the business. Stanley wanted to limit these complaints so that his team didn’t have to keep circling back to the same task.

Stanley knew he couldn’t solve this problem with increased headcount. For one, he didn’t have the budget. But he also knew that the inevitable human error would only multiply as he added more and more employees. Instead, he wanted a solution that allowed his existing team to operate smarter.

Stanley and his team quickly recognized automation as the only way around the problem. Automation would allow his current team to scale their work exponentially in order to meet the needs of all incoming employees, as well as ensure that errors were virtually eliminated.

In the search for an automation platform, Stanley kept four main criteria in mind: the platform had to be cloud-focused, have SSO capabilities, be user-friendly, and have the ability to go from vision to implementation in a short period of time—Stanley had no time to waste in producing value.

Stanley recognized Workato as the standout option and quickly implemented the platform in conjunction with redesigned employee onboarding and offboarding processes. Most notably for Stanley is the fact that Workato doesn’t just automate these processes, but actually helps orchestrate their flow.

The effect of Workato on employee onboarding has been immediate and monumental. VPN fulfillments have been reduced from several hours to nine seconds. Email is now provisioned 50x faster than before. And managers are automatically notified of employees that have been onboarded to the right tools.

Employee offboarding is also more streamlined and secure. Workato orchestrates with Okta, which is integrated with all relevant company applications, to ensure that deactivations correspond with the exact termination date. Now, there is no risk of errors or uncoordinated termination efforts.

Stanley and his team also used Workato to overcome challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Using anonymous tracking data gathered from employee phones, Workato alerted employees of COVID-19 contagion risk. With this strategy, Broadcom was able to bring back 50% of its workforce to the office.

In just three years, they have addressed 90 - 95% of all IT service provisioning, requiring zero human intervention, all fully automated. As a result, they are moving into more functional areas like HR, payroll, facilities, and finance to support more human intensive repetitive use cases.

Broadcom is now averaging 30+ new automation additions per quarter, which equates to 105,000 jobs run per month and 6,500 hours saved per month. Complaints have dropped from one every single day to being just about nonexistent. And new employees are productive faster than ever.