Voi is a Swedish micromobility company that offers e-scooter and e-bike sharing in partnership with towns, cities, and local communities. Customers love Voi because they can jump on a scooter or bike whenever and ride wherever in the city in just minutes — and do so completely carbon neutral. 

Voi operates in over 80 towns and cities across 11 countries. To date, Voi boasts more than six million riders and has served more than 100 million rides.

Challenge: 

In the time since it was founded in 2018, Voi has quickly gone from a few hundred employees to over 1,000. This meant more of everything: More employees, more onboarding, more SaaS applications. 

When Alex Tsarapatsanis, Head of IT, joined the company, he was tasked with building Voi’s first IT team. Initially, Tsarapatsanis managed the company’s growth by hiring two summer interns, both of whom were responsible for manually onboarding and offboarding employees and making sure they had everything they needed to start their job. Knowing the interns would only be with Voi for a couple months, Tsarapatsanis set out to ensure the IT team had a system in place to take over the tedious steps onboarding and offboarding entailed. 

Carl Michael Strauss, IT Team Lead at Voi, went on to compare the organization to an ice cream shop in the summer. “We rev up employment and could have twenty people starting on a Monday. Having a person dedicated to onboarding manually, copying and pasting between systems, introduces human error.” Strauss continued, “Having that process automated based on a trigger is secure and efficient.”

Solution:

Prior to implementing BetterCloud, Voi’s IT department needed roughly two weeks just to prepare to onboard a new employee. With BetterCloud’s zero touch workflows, Voi’s IT team triggers its onboarding process from its HRIS and automates 142 steps that would otherwise have been completed manually. “BetterCloud opened the way for us to run automations,” Tsarapatsanis said. 

Not only is this a win for IT, “other departments feel the effects of it. All their new hires get timely access to various SaaS applications they need to be productive,” said Strauss.

“We are managing the user lifecycle more securely and more timely than a human ever could,” said Tsarapatsanis. 

Extensibility to fit business needs 

Voi had previously operated with scattered admin consoles and added users to different systems on an ad hoc basis. The organization was in need of a solution that allowed for one source of truth, could connect different systems with APIs, and provide centralized management of their SaaS stack.

Voi has extended the capabilities of BetterCloud’s platform to integrate SaaS applications that are unique to their business. With our API, Voi’s IT team integrated two internal SaaS applications to BetterCloud and has plans to create additional integrations of Voi’s internally developed apps to broaden the scope of automations. “With an extended integration, we can now create or remove users from our own application and make sure the right security level is in place. This was previously super time consuming,” said Tsarapatsanis. 

The future is bright with zero touch IT

To illustrate the value of a zero touch mindset, Tsarapatsanis and Strauss walked through an example of automated workflows in action. After learning about BetterCloud’s integration with Jira, Strauss built a new workflow for two-factor authentication which was the most common issue reported in Jira. Today, the team’s responses to these tickets are completely automated with a self-service workflow. 

“It’s flawless, super easy, and no IT admin is needed.” Strauss reiterated, “Zero touch. I didn’t touch it once.” 

Elevating the role of IT to a strategic partner

BetterCloud eliminates the tedium associated with provisioning or deprovisioning an employee by automating common actions. With less time needed to execute the user lifecycle management (ULM) processes, IT can focus on more meaningful projects. 

“BetterCloud removes the day to day routines that you always have to do, but anyone could do. They don’t require an IT professional. However, they have to be done—and they have to be done correctly,” said Tsarapatsanis.

“You need an audit trail of who was onboarded and what kind of access they got. All that time and headache can be removed through automation and time can be used to focus on other priorities.” 

Voi’s IT department has a policy where 70% of tasks should be shared by the team so everyone is knowledgeable in various areas. The remaining 30% should be spent on initiatives that are of interest, whether that be leadership, APIs, security. That 30% allows the team to grow professionally. Without BetterCloud, the 30% would be consumed by common repetitive tasks.

“We can focus on more things that would otherwise be occupied with onboarding or similar tasks,” Strauss said.  

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