Time and again, we’ve seen how automation makes our customers’ lives easier. But in many cases, it does much more than that—our champions have earned promotions, company-wide recognition, and newfound influence over strategic decision-making all because of their role in automation strategy. Of its many benefits, automation is undoubtedly a springboard for career success.
In this post, we sat down with Amy Jorde, Senior Integrations Architect at Toast, to learn how automation has transformed her career.
Trying to find organization in chaos
“When I was in accounting, and specifically when I was first starting out in billing, I thought a lot of things were—for lack of a better word—dumb,” says Jorde.
Those “things” were all of the repetitive processes involved in accounting, such as typing out contract start/end dates many times over or moving Excel files into different applications. The processes were inefficient, boring, and more prone to error.
So Jorde got to work figuring out solutions. She started by learning Excel macros. Then, she was recruited to create a new version of Zuora RevPro that would better align revenue processes to a new accounting system.
By way of these early fixes, Jorde’s interest in process improvement and business systems piqued. Little did she know, it would eventually lead her to a brand new career path where automation would play a big role.
Pivoting to the IT applications realm
Jorde realized that her natural curiosity for business systems would do a lot more good in the IT application space than in accounting. She made a case to switch departments, and quickly proved that she was worth her salt.
Her success attracted the attention of another company, Gainsight, and it brought Jorde on as the only official member of the IT applications team. Her task? Ensure that all of the systems across the company were synced.
Jorde knew this wasn’t a problem that she could solve on her own. However, at the time, Gainsight didn’t have the budget to expand her one-woman team. So, she turned to technology solutions, instead.
Jorde conducted a full evaluation of 15 automation tools. In the end, Workato won out for its ease of use and deep integration capabilities.
Jorde went above and beyond Gainsight’s expectations with Workato—they may have hired one employee, but the work she was able to accomplish could have been done by three. Moreover, the experience with Workato clarified that she was on the right career path.
Leveraging automation for a business-critical project
To deepen her experience, Jorde took a role as an integration engineer at Malwarebytes, where she was pleased to see that the team had already implemented automation in full swing.
Malwarebytes, however, was using Boomi—not Workato. Boomi wasn’t Jorde’s favorite automation tool (she had already ruled it out during her evaluation at Gainsight), but she was happy to learn the ropes.
Boomi was manageable for the work at hand. That is, until a new project emerged.
Malwarebytes needed to migrate a huge amount of data to a new data warehouse they were building. The company hired a consultancy firm to help investigate solutions and it—independent of Jorde’s influence—recommended Workato.
In order to have one tool for both migrating data and managing integrations between systems, Malwarebytes replaced Boomi with Workato.
Thriving with automation
Jorde’s career “really thrived again” at Malewarebytes, which only benefited her employer.
Not only was Malwarebytes able to successfully transfer data to its new data warehouse, but Jorde’s team was also able to kick off Workato as the key automation platform between all sorts of business applications.
Malwarebytes can now transfer thousands of records each month with speed and efficiency. Just about everything is orchestrated through Workato, examples of which include:
- Collecting a high volume of opportunities and quotes from internal databases
- Controlling processing times to reduce impact across the systems
- Managing flow of orders from Salesforce to NetSuite
- Orchestrating automated renewals and usage based billing
- Process monitoring through Slack and logging of issues in Salesforce
- Product integrations to provide customer self-service for license additions and invoice download
The impact on Malwarebytes was huge—they’ve experienced increased efficiency, which they equated to revenue gains.
Taking the driver’s seat of her career
Much of Jorde’s job transitions were driven by her professional connections. And while she values the connections she’s built over time, she recently decided to use her track record of accomplishments to drive her career forward. The result was a big success: She now works as a Senior Technology Architect, Enterprise Integrations at Toast.
To ensure she hit the ground running, Jorde decided to lean on her tried-and-true, not-so-secret weapon with Workato. The decision was an easy one, as throughout her roles she’s found automation to be a “sure thing” for not only streamlining manual work but also for driving business outcomes.
While Jorde is only a few months in at Toast, she’s excited about extending their use of Workato by designing impactful automations that offer repeatable success.
In the meantime, Jorde is still having fun.
“It’s fun, I just really enjoy the end product when it makes the lives of all the people around me better,” says Jorde. ”I think that’s the number one thing, just enjoying seeing a beautiful automation process.”
