After spending 10 years custom building integrations between internal systems, camping store, 4WD Supacentre recently made the decision to partner with an integration platform and has since become a key local customer of Workato.
4WD Supacentre chief information officer, Csaba Hegyi (pictured right: above) told Retailbiz about the company’s experience in getting its tech stack right.
“We started our integration journey about 18 months ago with the aim to redesign our architecture. We started with different technologies, but it wasn’t going the way we wanted. This is when we engaged with Workato and they helped mitigate the complexities between technologies,” he said.
“They’ve provided excellent customer service and helped us migrate from one platform to another. We went live with one of the systems in April this year and since then, we’ve added more integrations. We receive 24/7 access to their customer service team on Google Chat and have developed a great partnership on both a personal and professional level.
“The big difference between Workato and other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies is that there’s no significant maintenance costs or engineers on payroll. We can access the product ourselves and understand what’s required. We didn’t need developers to oversee the setup, create source codes, integration, and build automation. However, we can still achieve customisation and short turnaround times for new features.
“As a client, I’m super happy with Workato and their contribution to our business.”
Workato is a cloud-native platform which means organisations receive more out of the box in terms of integration and automation capabilities, according to Workato managing director for Australia and New Zealand, John Deeb (pictured).
“There are traditional technologies in the space that cater for on premise integration and automation. We strive to make the experience intuitive and powerful, which exceeds our customer’s expectations,” he told Retailbiz.
“Low-code no-code can often be tarnished with the idea that it’s simple – you can only do simple things. But we offer powerful things that come in the extensibility, or the ability to connect to complex systems and deliver complex automations to cater to specific business needs.
“We are pleased to be working with Csaba and the 4WD Supacentre team. Our priority is to see them succeed and we have been able to overcome obstacles by focusing on the outcome and results.”
For the 4WD Supacentre business, cybersecurity and the isolation of systems is an important consideration.
“In the past we had B2B integrations which slowed us down for financial reporting. We moved away from the previous technology because it didn’t satisfy basic cybersecurity government standards such as least access management. By comparison, these types of features come out of the box with Workato at no additional cost,” Hegyi said.
“Prior to engaging with Workato, we had inaccurate data and too much dependency on systems. Having a single system gives us greater visibility on returns which is one of the benefits for our business.”
4WD Supacentre is currently implementing a new point of sale (POS) system and some limitations in the software were discovered. “We have another system performing a similar role and we were able to create about 50% of the functionality of the POS system and delegate it back to an existing system within four days,” Hegyi said.
“We’re moving through a three-year roadmap, and we’ve reached the 12-month mark. We’ve done lots of heavy lifting and evidencing the biggest return on investments (ROI) by going through top-heavy technology. We’re now investigating how we can enable the business to make internal developments faster.”
Speaking to the findings of Workato’s recent W*rk Automation Index, including that two-thirds of organisations have five or more departments using automation, Deeb believes there’s more talk about leaner processes and more efficiencies as people start to feel inflation and rising interest rates.
“Despite this, people are still investing in growth and there’s been tremendous uptake of applying automation and integration, particularly in the retail industry,” he said.
“Automation in its nature feels like a recession-proof technology because it can offer scale in the good times and deliver efficiency in the tough times. The goal of automation is to remove manual effort from activities to divert resources to other areas to save money or get things done faster.
“We will continue to help our customers like 4WD Supacentre get more out of existing technology investments and integrate new technology investments. It’s about disrupting the traditional integration automation space by offering a new capability with modern cloud architecture.”