Changing times and the availability of thousands of apps and tools have prodded organizations to rethink the challenge of scaling and managing their workforces effectively.
For Ashik Ahmed, CTO, CEO, and Co-founder of Deputy, the solution to this is less about finding one system or platform that does everything—like a Swiss Army Knife—but to find the best system for each job and make sure they work really well together.
“The Swiss Army Knife platform, it’s got everything in it. But while they do everything, they don’t do anything well at all. You don’t get to be great at any of the functional jobs you’re doing,” he explains during a session at our recent Automate conference.
Watch Ashik explain how he built a thriving ecosystem at Deputy.
Building a thriving ecosystem for a thriving workforce
Deputy is a workforce management tool with a clear mission to simplify administrative tasks related to shift work, such as scheduling, timesheets, and workplace communication for businesses, so these businesses can become more profitable, connected, and trusted by employees.
To achieve their mission, Deputy needed to first transform their own ecosystem into the best version it can be.
Prior to getting Workato, Deputy’s team of systems engineers, which included Ashik himself, had to write a lot of code and scripts to get their systems working together. This quickly became difficult to maintain, given the resources available. Implementing Workato lightened the load on their engineers, as they could now focus on building the Deputy platform. Meanwhile, IT and business architects could handle the integrations that facilitate internal ops with Workato.
Ashik chose Workato for the reasons below:
- Easy to use
- Low code
- Scalable and easy to maintain
- Enables speedy execution
- Easy to build and visualize workflows
- Empowered business units
How Deputy is using Workato
Ashik shared three practical use cases of how Deputy is using Workato in three distinct parts of the business—revenue ops, people ops, and general productivity.
To enrich customer data, Deputy connected AWS, their data warehouse, with Intercom to automatically extract and analyze AWS data. The automation then populates the data in Intercom according to pre-determined fields. This has vastly improved the quality and visibility of data, especially for customer support.
A second integration, also powered by Workato, connected Salesforce, Deputy’s platform, and Intercom bidirectionally. This enabled Deputy to better capture data about product usage and customer journey information.
Other use cases Ashik discussed during the session included connecting BambooHR and Slack with their own Deputy platform to streamline onboarding and the leave deduction process, as well as a marketing compliance use case. The latter automation ensures that when people opt out of marketing information, they’re automatically opted out from every system.
In a nutshell, Ashik summarizes Workato’s role in Deputy as one that plugs all the gaps that exist between the systems they use.
“A company is nothing but a people-powered machine. People need to use systems to be the best they can be at their job. If you have thriving systems, you will have a thriving workforce.”
