Webinar Recap: Harnessing the Power of Workato to Integrate Your Technology Stack Embrace Automation Mindset
The recent “Integrate Your Technology Stack Embrace Automation Mindset” webinar, co-organised by PointStar Consulting and Workato, saw industry experts discuss integration, automation, and how generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is transforming businesses.
In his opening remarks, PointStar Consulting director William Chaylis addressed the issue of SaaS sprawl, where organisations use various software to address different pain points, and how Workato’s integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution could be a game changer.
“It is quite common for some customers to have more than 10 systems to operate. These could be a cloud ERP, a payroll system, a procurement system, or your e-commerce platform,” said William.
“We are seeing more and more companies using different applications and thinking about how they can connect them. And that is Workato’s strength. Workato enables you to connect various systems and multiple data sources for data enrichment processes.
“Workato has been named the best in Gartner’s Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Magic Quadrant for six consecutive years and market. That’s a testament to how solid and committed Workato is to developing this powerful product and helping transform your business.
The Work Automation Index by Workato sheds light on the proliferation of Gen AI and its use by organisations worldwide. William uncovered exciting nuggets of information from the Work Automation Index.
“We are witnessing a 500% increase in Gen AI endpoints even though spending associated with Gen AI amounts to less than 1% of enterprise spending. We are also seeing a 400% growth in processes with Gen AI,” added William.
“You may have already seen these trends in our day-to-day life. You have seen emails and felt, ‘Hey, this could have been written by a real person’, but it is written by AI. People are using AI to help catapult their revenue operations.”
Meanwhile, PointStar Consulting’s System Integration Consultant, Joseph Yeo, shared his inputs based on real-life instances. He covered API management, where to start in your integration and automation journey, and a customer success story.
“One of Workato’s strengths is API management. Workato workflows can act as API endpoints for other applications to call on. That means that there may not be a need for an organisation to have API specialists to build APIs anymore, “ said Joseph.
“You can utilise Workato’s workflows to build API with little, to no codes required, and you’ll be able to manage all these different APIs within the single the single Workato platform.”
The need for integration may be pressing for many organisations, yet enabling automation conjures fearful thoughts. Automation and AI often seem mystical to many. However, with technological progress, organisations like Workato have enabled the simple initiation of automation and AI into your business processes with a few simple steps.
“One of the first questions a user might have is, ‘Where do I start’? And the tip that we give is always start from what you’re familiar with, which is your existing business processes. For example, your finance team spends multiple days every month compiling Excel data. Or perhaps you have a few full-time employees manually updating their tickets. Now, these are all potential workflows that could be automated using Workato,” added Joseph.
“Usually, we will see companies just starting their digitization journey look out for areas they can optimise. And looking at existing workflows is a good starting point to see if there are any opportunities for automation.”
The perfect embodiment of how good a product is best reflected by its users. The Closet Lover, a Singapore-based fashion retail outlet, is an organisation that has benefitted significantly from Workato, thanks in no small part to its choosing of PointStar Consulting as the implementation partner.
“The Closet Lover had several point-to-point technical automations that were consistently breaking down. Due to that, transactional data was being lost as their demand and sales grew. A lot of manual intervention was required to fix this issue,” said Joseph.
“As Workato’s implementation partner, we helped replace The Closet Lover’s existing integrations with Workato integrations, which, in turn, solved their scaling issue. A good thing is they also identified several new workflows that would make things easier for them. So, you know, they came in with a problem, and they went out with not only a solution for their problem but a solution for other issues as well.”
The event concluded following a question and answer session where the floor was opened up for participants to clear their doubts. The speakers also offered PointStar Consulting’s preliminary IT assessments to participants who wanted to know more about how their organisation could benefit from Workato.
