Productivity, efficiency and automation are buzzwords used by us all. However, are we actually doing anything to help us achieve these things or we just talking about it. It isn’t exactly as simple as clicking a button, but there are tech tools that can be relatively easily adapted in our daily lives.
To find out more, we speak to an entrepreneur, Allan Teng, Founder & Managing Director, Workato APJ, who is helping others with their productivity. He actually joined Workato in Silicon Valley in 2014, as an intern under a year-long university programme. Upon his return home, he set up a Singapore entity while still at school. In the 7 years since, Allan ha established the brand and leads over 250 people spanning 10 locations, including Singapore, Australia and the Philippines.
Mayank Agarwal, CTO of Hubilo shares his productivity tools
Workato is a Integration and Automation Platform that enables both business and IT teams to integrate their apps and automate business workflows. There is no coding required, and the platform utilizes Machine Learning and patented technology to make the creation and implementation of automations 10X faster than traditional platforms.
The company has grown to over 11,000 customers, including many in highly-regulated industries like banking and healthcare.
Improve productivity with Workato (Paid)
The Workato automations we’ve set up internally helps me save time and drive productivity and communication across my teams.
For instance, our Sales Intelligence automation allows us to leverage recorded sales calls from Gong, tap into existing knowledge from Guru, and pull competitor data from Salesforce to make strategic recommendations. The workflow brings information cutting across several different platforms together so our Sales team can formulate informed and competitive next steps.
As Workato is an intuitive, low/no-code, platform, anyone from any department in my office can create their own automation systems in collaboration with our business technology team.
Some of the best automation systems we use on a day-to-day basis were created by non-technical team members. Our Back-to-Office Accelerator was built by our HR team in response to the evolving COVID-19 workplace regulations.
It enables safe and easy office re-entry by ensuring employees are able to log their proof of vaccination, check if there’s space available before they enter the office and improve coordination across teams.
Workato empowers my team and I to take ownership of improving productivity and removing roadblocks in the workplace.
Grab for better a better commute (Paid)
As an entrepreneur, I am often required to travel for meetings and events. Grab has truly been helpful in my entrepreneur journey, with the multiple functions that it has introduced in the application.
Firstly, it helps me get from place to place easily, and I get to spend the duration of my journey to clear some work or catch a breather before heading to my next appointment.
While working from home, GrabFood has fed me on multiple occasions, especially on days where I did not have the time to prepare a meal for myself. Just in a few simple clicks, I am able to enjoy my favourite meals from my favourite eateries, which are all available via the Grab platform.
Other services such as GrabExpress (courier) also makes it so much more convenient for myself to make quick or planned deliveries of items or goods from one place to another, all which having my mind at ease.
Docusign to help with secure document sharing (Paid)
With my hectic work schedule, I find DocuSign truly helpful as it allows me to sign any documents from anywhere, on any device. This makes it much easier and more convenient to get paperwork settled without long waiting times – especially useful when important documents need to be signed/acknowledged within a tight timeline.
Docusign documents are also encrypted, ensuring that the entire process and details contained within it are safe and secure from potential malicious users. This is especially critical in an age of digitalisation, resulting in increased cyberattacks – which have affected many organisations in APAC and beyond.
I have used Docusign in my collaborations and dealings with customers, partners, vendors and internal stakeholders.
As a bonus, this saves me the hassle of looking for a functional pen every time I need to sign a document. Our signatures are saved within the application for optimum convenience.
Automate and integrate with Workbot for Slack (Paid)
Workato’s Workbots help us and our customers automate and integrate workflows within the one environment that everyone in a company accesses frequently, such as our communication platform — in our case it’s Slack (but we also support MS Teams). Approvals, requests and data entry processes are all automated within Slack, removing the need for employees to access different systems.
One bot that has helped save my team and I time is the Firefighter bot, which manages app provisioning and de-provisioning. If an employee needs access to an app, they can simply make a request on Firefighter, after which their manager can approve their request on Slack. Firefighter also helps us optimise our SaaS spend and ensures that access to company apps are controlled if or when employees leave the company.
Our bots also allow employees to access our company’s benefits (Benefits Bot), reserve a spot to work in the office (Office Bot) and send birthday greetings to my colleagues (Birthday Bot), all from the same familiar interface we use for regular communications. This simplifies the process and makes it really convenient for the whole team to use.
Manage access to platforms with OneLogin (Paid)
With workplaces becoming distributed and now that the hybrid work model has become the new norm, it is crucial that our data remains secure and private.
OneLogin is an identity and access management platform that helps my employees and I work on hundreds of different apps securely.
Our team members are able to connect to all of the applications we use through one interface, ensuring that the work experience is seamless, yet secure. This also means team members hit the ground running and IT no longer spends so much time on access provisioning.
This truly saves up the time of our IT teams to focus on more key and strategic infrastructure management matters, allowing the organisation to further thrive in the long run.