Workato Partner | Systems Integrator partner

Workato & Chakray

Chakray is a Systems Integrator partner with Workato. Workato has rapidly become a leader for analysts in the Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) market. Our partnership with Workato enables us to provide customers with certified Workato professionals in the UK, Spain, Canada, LATAM and APAC regions. Our experts have experience building recipes for key integration processes, connecting with popular SaaS applications, leveraging enterprise features and structuring Workato’s API Management platform in deployments.

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Whether you’re connecting applications, databases or systems, creating integrations or automating workflows across organizations, we can provide a customized demo for you!

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How we help with Workato

Ensuring you have the right technologies, deployed the right way with the right underpinning capability is crucial to a successful integration strategy. At Chakray, we help organisations to define their integration strategy, assess/select appropriate technologies and realise the value of what they deploy. We work with customers to digitise processes, modernise legacy systems through APIs and provide the foundational capability for their Digital Transformation initiatives.

We see integration as an organisational capability that underpins an associated integration strategy. We help organisations to establish this capability, validate their technologies or approach, develop integration processes, build APIs and deliver integration initiatives with the Workato platform. This may be through Chakray’s own Integration Centre of Excellence (ICoE) or through a ICoE we help the organisation to establish themselves.

We provide the following Workato services:

Training

Design

Architecture

Integration Accelerator

Managed Services / Support

Implementation / Development

Delivery / Project Management

Workato’s platform is relatively simple to adopt, but also a highly capable and functional platform. Organisations looking at it are generally looking at process automation within a functional area likely associated with the departmental deployment of a SaaS system. For many use cases, Workato would qualify as a citizen integrator application, however, its broader capability also makes it a platform that benefits from the guidance of integration specialists like Chakray. Regardless, it should still be positioned within a broader integration strategy and associated with use cases where its value can best be realised.

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Extended Workato Support

In addition to the above services, one of Chakray’s unique offerings is our Workato Extended Support service, through which we provide support and resolve any Workato platform issues for our customers on a 5/8 schedule.

Service features:

Perform escalation and intermediation with the Workato manufacturer as many times as necessary to address product malfunction or performance issues.
Provide recommendations on the use and technical features of the Workato platform.
Implement activities and actions to address escalated requests from each client when deployed solutions fail for any of the implemented recipes, add ons or connectors.
Improvement or fine-tuning of integrations, recipes, and implementations in Workato.
Management, classification, resolution, and/or escalation of issues detected during the support process.
Questions and/or clarifications with regards to the use of the tool.
Scheduled monitoring for error detection and prevention.
Support in implementing best practices for the use of the platform.
Customized implementation support and maintenance.
For contracts of more than 12 months, an update of the platform’s functionalities and annual training will be provided.
Analysis of new areas of opportunity for implementing process automation.

Expand your automation horizons with Workato Extended Support

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The Role of Workato in Enhancing Business Functions

Workato has the potential to be widely utilised by citizen integrators across different organisational functions, mainly the following six areas:

IT Automation

By providing an integration platform, Workato supports IT professionals in streamlining and automating repeatable IT processes. For instance, Workato automates the integration of incident management systems, such as ServiceNow and communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams. These incident management systems can detect problems and automate the handling of incidents through incoming messages or tickets, assigning them to appropriate team members.

Additionally, Workato platform enables automation of tasks such as:

Data synchronisation
User onboarding/offboarding
Account access management
Application provisioning

Workato improves collaboration and accelerates IT operations and service management within the organisation.

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HR Automation

HR professionals are faced with a wide range of duties that come with a unique set of challenges. They handle complex employee data, systems, regulations, administrative and strategic obligations every day. Workato unifies HR data that might otherwise exist separately, reducing the need to manually work with important information. It does so by integrating different HR systems such as Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), Human Capital Management (HCM) and Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) software.

Workato simplifies and automates key HR functions such as:
Talent acquisition
Onboarding
Offboarding
Allocation of leaves
Employee performance management
Referral tracking

Workato transforms these functions into automated, self-service modules. By including Workato in the HR function, the organisation will witness an improvement in data integrity, process efficiency and employee satisfaction.

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Finance Automation

Workato increases the productivity of finance teams by reducing data errors and promoting informed decision-making. It streamlines and automates workflow by integrating various financial applications and systems such as ERP systems, CPQ softwares, payment gateways, and banking systems.

Workato improves the following tasks in the finance function:

Invoicing
Quote-to-cash (Q2C) cycles
Provides real-time visibility into financial data
Automates account payable (AP) and procurement activities

Workato’s ability to synchronise and transform data reduces manual data entry and automates tasks such as updating and maintaining receipts, invoices, contracts, and other financial documents. It also records user interactions with the system, including document creation and updates. This kind of consistent record-keeping can help finance teams navigate compliance requirements. By coupling these distinct systems and data silos, we can encapsulate interdependent sales and financial operations. Ultimately, Workato can improve users’ view of financial and budgetary processes, especially through the use of financial reporting, analytics, and forecasts.

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Support Automation

Support is a continuous operation that begins at the later stages of the customer journey and stays until the end of a company-client relationship. Therefore, automation is essential to facilitate interaction pathways between the two parties.

Some of the tasks that Workato improves include:

Ticket management—integrating apps like Zendesk with other systems
Automating updates to training-related content and help desks
Aggregating data from multiple communication channels such as emails, feedback forms, CRMS, etc.
Fortifying a self-service practice through individual client portals

Overall, this elevates your company’s products and services in the eyes of the customer.

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Sales Automation

Sales teams can benefit from Workato’s endless list of capabilities, including the ability to create custom workflows suited to different kinds of sales processes and business needs.

Workato makes the following sales tasks easier and more automated:

Lead management
Opportunity management
Order processing
Customer relationship building

For example, Workato can be used to route leads to sales representatives according to some fixed criteria, guaranteeing prompt and efficient follow-ups. Similarly, Workato enables communication with different members of the sales team, ensuring that the entire function works towards uniform objectives. With Workato, cross-functional collaboration between departments becomes a breeze, smoothing the overall customer journey. For instance, the sales team can easily pass data further down the business pipeline, such as finalised opportunities to customer success and support teams.

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Marketing Automation

The strategic planning involved in marketing becomes simple with Workato’s robust platform. It enhances data connectivity across systems that are crucial to marketing, including but not limited to ERP, CRM, content management, and digital asset management software.

Workato automates the following activities in the marketing function:

Creating campaigns
Generating and delivering leads
Scheduling marketing materials such as emails, articles, social media posts, surveys, etc.
Simplifies the connection and integration of ERP systems such as SAP, NetSuite, among others, and CRM tools such as Salesforce and HubSpot

For a data-driven marketing approach, Workato optimises analytics at every stage of the marketing funnel. For example, it automates data extraction on leads, campaigns, conversion rates, website and social media traffic, events, form fill-ups, and so on. It also allows seamless integration with third-party and custom analytics platforms for a more visual marketing experience.

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Ebook

The Agnostic Integration Framework

Find out in this guide how Chakray can help your organization identify and adopt the capabilities you need to achieve your digital potential.

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Why Workato

At first glance, Workato appears to be a platform that requires relatively little expert intervention in order to adopt it within an organisation. However, it is a very well thought out proposition with capabilities that can meet the needs of many enterprise use cases. The platform provides robust testing and debugging capability allowing administrators to replay failed transactions. RPA and workbot features add value beyond what buyers typically expect to see in integration platform technology.

There is an overall neatness in approach that makes the platform intuitive to use. Likewise the pricing model and value is easy to rationalise in an organisation. Workato has a rich suite of connectors for SaaS applications/technologies and simple gateway implementation for on-premise system connectivity. As an overall proposition, Workato, should be easy to visualise or position within an organisation’s integration strategy. Enabling citizen integrators and power users through recipes and offering fast time to value in deployment.

Smaller organisations will often find that Workato can meet the majority if not all their integration needs. Larger enterprise customers will likely employ the technology as part of an Agnostic Integration Framework of technologies and capabilities.

Our Approach

For many of our customers, their first engagement with us is through an Integration Accelerator. This fixed cost & low friction engagement enables organisations to quickly prove out the value of implementing Workato. We do this, helping customers select meaningful use cases that demonstrate return on investment early. Having and maintaining a value based approach is important.

For some organisations, this will be their sole integration technology investment. For others this may be where they start their integration journey. Many larger enterprises may already be a long way into their integration journey when they first engage Workato. This is why, at Chakray, we place so much emphasis on valuing solutions the right way. Regardless of what your pre-existing investments are in integration, what is the right choice and shape of deployment for the problem the organisation is facing. A solid integration strategy will help organisations position where use cases should fit in both capability and technology terms.

We see integration as an organisation capability. For some of our customers we provide their complete end-to-end capability, for others we guide them in building their capability or associated centre of excellence. Whether it is development of integration, design of APIs, deployment of API Facades, provision of scrum development teams or deployment of industry specific solutions.

Workato Considerations

The first key consideration with a technology like Workato is not to write it off. Highly technical reviewers may confuse simplicity with a lack of overall capability. Scripting capability within the platform enables the delivery of complex integration scenarios. Likewise, simplicity in some of the workbot capabilities may also add significant value in approval chains or in accelerating processes lifecycles, especially in Sales functions. Small business process efficiency gains in industries like manufacturing can have a significant impact on the business.

Workato’s lack of an on-premise agent that transacts and processes the data on-premise will be a concern for some organisations or more correctly some organisational scenarios. Not all data is necessarily subject to the same security concerns and organisations can get this wrong with catchall policies around where and how data can be transacted. Just as it is important to value the solution, it is also important to value the data the right way.

Structure of integration recipes, use of community recipes, sharing recipes and policies around them are also important. For a smaller organisation, a community recipe may represent the perfect project head start. For an enterprise, the same recipe may introduce governance issues or risks that aren’t acceptable to the organisation. Again, this is where positioning the technology properly within your integration strategy and establishing the right governance around its use is important.

Building integration capability is a journey. Knowing when to employ the right product or capability, building the skills, knowledge sharing and establishing a centre of excellence are all things Chakray can help with.

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About Chakray

Chakray has been a specialist integration consultancy since 2013. Our entire team lives and breathes the body of knowledge and discipline of Integration. Whether it is Enterprise Integration Patterns, IPaaS, Microservices or Event Streaming we bring a connected integration mindset to the table when we solve problems for our customers. We help our customers best leverage and realise the value of the technologies they are engaging whilst helping them avoid or eliminate technical debt in implementations. Whether it is data expertise, integration, DevOps or something specific like GDPR or data protection, we bring the right SMEs and experience in implementation to assist. Our customers lean on our experience to avoid the common pitfalls and establish the right capabilities within their organisation.