Case Study
Empowering Business Areas With Woba and Low-Code
How Woba’s IT team delivers high-quality processes for 5 departments using Pipefy
About Woba
Woba is a platform that provides hybrid workspace solutions for companies. Its flagship product, OfficePass is a subscription that allows employees of one company to access office space wherever it is more convenient to them, throughout a large network of shared workspaces. Clients are also able to access meeting room rentals, virtual offices, private rooms, and built-to-suit premises.
Woba is considered Latin America’s biggest coworking platform with over 1,100 spaces in over 170 Brazilian cities, as well as in a few other cities around the world.
The challenges of a 100% remote organization
Founded in 2015, Woba functioned 100% remotely from the moment it was created, becoming a reference and specialist in emerging topics such as remote work and the future of work.
However, working remotely has also brought several challenges to the Woba team. They have always required well-defined processes and information flows, since their employees have always worked remotely and often work in different time zones.
The company had problems managing its many teams and as the company grew, these problems became more difficult to manage. They lacked a centralized tool for managing processes. Even whilst using slack to manage communications, processes within each team would often be dealt with using different platforms, making it difficult to standardize internal processes.
Data storage also posed a challenge because the team used different cloud services, hampering interactions with coworkers and other departments.
Marcelo Bogobil, IT and Integrations Manager, was directly impacted by the lack of centralization and standardization of data living in Hungary — always in a different time zone as his coworkers.
In some cases, a person from the Customer Success team would call a coworking space to talk about one subject, and another person would call immediately after to ask for the same information. This weakened our partner’s trust in us because it made us look messy.
Marcelo Bogobil
IT & Integrations Manager
A change in culture with low-code
Woba has always functioned as a startup: focusing on continuous testing and improving its products, services, and processes. These constant tests and changes in strategies meant they needed more control over the flow of information across departments.
The company’s main goal was to create a controlled environment for designing and testing new processes in a quick and efficient way. Marcelo Bogobil and the IT team were the innovators of the project “Process Lab.”
The IT team’s idea was to centralize processes in a shared platform for all of their operations, giving each department the autonomy they needed for customizing their own workflows, but providing standardization for data management and visibility.
Being a low-code platform — that didn’t require technical knowledge — Pipefy was chosen to be the process orchestrating platform for several departments.
A few months after implementing Pipefy, IT began to receive process requests from their company’s business areas. The IT team managed to quickly implement these flows with a streamlined implementation approach that moves from process design and area training to delivery.
Integration with existing applications within each department is an important part of the process construction in Pipefy. The IT department uses three different integration platforms: Pipefy’s open API, Workato, and Zapier (two cloud-based system connectors).
After the customized process is delivered through Pipefy, each department is empowered to adapt the platform in their own way. The IT & Integrations team encourages process improvements, which are completed by individuals from each department that own, manage and interact with these processes on a daily basis.
Currently, Pipefy lets us test new processes and learn in a very simple and inexpensive way, freeing up our development team to act solely on top-priority projects.
Marcelo Bogobil
IT & Integrations Manager
Results: empowering and automating processes
After achieving their primary goal of centralizing and standardizing processes in a low-code platform, Woba’s team started to focus on efficiency gains. One of their strategies was to identify process automation possibilities in steps that were repeated often and done manually.
Customer Relationship Management (also known as CRM) is the process that has gained the most efficiency. Maintaining a good relationship with coworking spaces is Woba; hence, it’s one of the most complex and important processes in the company.
Several automation rules were added to this complex workflow, which runs through several departments in the organization. This allows teams to automatically communicate with internal and external clients using emails and notifications.
After a year and a half of implementing Pipefy, Woba has already achieved impressive results. By the end of 2021, 5 departments were using Pipefy to manage over 60 different processes.
Their efficiency gain is also notable: by utilizing the automation rules in Pipefy, Woba’s team has managed to save over 560 monthly work hours, which is equivalent to two full-time employees. These two employees can now leave those repetitive tasks behind and participate in higher value-added tasks in the business.
Some people ask me why we built our CRM in Pipefy when there are other more specific tools in the market. Our goal was precisely to be able to test and deploy flows in parts, inside Pipefy. We have all the resources we need, and little by little we connected more processes, external tools, and automated each part of this big process.
Marcelo Bogobil
IT & Integrations Manager
Woba’s future, with a focus on continuous improvement
By the beginning of 2022, Woba surpassed 100 employees. Even with a solid product and a rapidly expanding team, their startup mindset remains unchanged. The routine of testing, changing, and improving is part of every employee’s mindset.
5 of Woba’s 8 departments already use Pipefy, and the plan is to slowly bring it to 100% of the company. Pipefy’s flexible and low-code interface empowers each company manager to test and improve their processes in a few clicks, without necessarily reaching out to IT & Integrations for each modification.
Woba’s main process, in which Pipefy is used as a CRM, is already in its third version, and the IT team keeps improving it further. Because the company’s operations are always open to optimizations, the platform needs to be flexible so that processes can be tweaked at any time — which they take advantage of in Pipefy.
Woba has ambitious growth goals for the coming years, and Pipefy remains a great partner in this cycle of process improvement and team efficiency.
Integrations
API
Zapier
Workato
Specifications
- Industry: Technology
- Company size: 51-200 employees
- Departments using Pipefy: IT, Customer Support, Sales, Finance
- Processes: IT Requests, CRM, Customer Onboarding, Satisfaction Survey, among others
