ChowNow is a rapidly growing online food ordering platform that offers branded mobile apps, website ordering, and restaurant marketing services.
Customer Story
Improving security and automating 90% of employee on/off-boarding at ChowNow
For employee onboarding, we used to enter the same information into at least 10 and up to 50 different applications.
Challenges
- 10-50 - Different HR applications requiring manual data entry
- 1 hour - Manual onboarding process per employee
- 1 hour - Manual offboarding process per employee
Jeff Sutton, IT Manager at ChowNow needed to address the company’s costly manual employee onboarding and offboarding processes.
Not only was company growth impeded by the huge amount of time dedicated to these processes, but Jeff was painfully aware that manual processes had the potential to open the company up to security risks, such as failing to revoke access to tools and data when offboarding employees.
In its current state, employee onboarding required around 45 minutes of manual process per new hire, while offboarding required about 1 hour per churned employee. The crux of the problem was that there were just too many “boxes to check”, which slowed processes and presented ample opportunity for human error. Jeff knew there had to be a better way.
Solutions
- Connect ChowNow’s HR hub, Zenefits, to Office 365 and Slack.
- Use automated flows triggered by onboarding and offboarding events.
- Notify HR, Facilities, and hiring managers of events via Slack.
After learning about Workato, Jeff realized that not only would he be able to cut down on the manual steps involved in onboarding and offboarding, but he could eliminate them entirely through automation.
His team decided to use Workato to integrate HR’s central information hub, Zenefits, to Office 365 and Slack in order to provide Facilities, HR, and hiring managers with updates. This meant increased security, scalable hiring, an improved employee experience, and significant time and cost savings.
Results
- Removal of manual data entry into 10-50 different applications
- 1 hour of work per onboarded / offboarded employee → 0 minutes
- Airtight security
ChowNow has successfully automated 90% of its onboarding and offboarding process, increasing the company’s productivity, employee experience, and security, while simultaneously decreasing cost.
For Jeff and his team, it’s meant smoother days, less stress, more efficiency, and being able to focus on strategic work, rather than manual process. What’s more, the success of Workato for HR onboarding and offboarding has served as a model for a new automation opportunity: onboarding new customers.
Now, instead of employees manually uploading menus from new customers, Workato pushes images of menus to Google to then be transformed to text, where it is automatically uploaded into Google Sheets and stored in the appropriate Google file—with a notification sent to the account admin upon completion. The new automated process is saving the company a whopping 6,000 hours per year!
