Auctane, the parent company to several world-class shipping and mailing brands such as ShipStation, Stamps.com, and ShipEngine, orchestrates the shipping and delivery of billions of orders annually. Serving over a million businesses and reaching more than 500 million households each year, Auctane provides comprehensive e-commerce solutions for businesses of all sizes, from small home-based operations to large enterprises. 

Auctane experienced rapid growth in the last few years, acquiring several shipping technology services into its suite of products. As the company expanded, Auctane’s IT team faced significant growing pains, especially around user provisioning. According to Ryan Pesta, Corporate IT Manager at Auctane, “We were onboarding up to 30 users a month using a hodgepodge of manual data entry, custom-built scripts, and different point-to-point automation solutions. We knew it wasn’t a scalable solution.”

The complexity of managing IT scripts, including Powershell and Cron jobs, was a serious drain of resources, especially given the multinational complexity of their business and the different stacks involved in new acquisitions. Additionally, as the company grew, the IT team struggled to maintain oversight while enabling others to create automations.

“We’re a very complex business,” explains Ryan. “We have a lot of different teams all doing similar things but for different products. We needed a scalable, enterprise-grade solution that would be able to accommodate the complexity of the business while still providing the security and governance the IT team needed.”

After building a few test workflows on Tray's Universal Automation Cloud, Ryan knew that it offered the flexibility, scalability, and governance that his team was looking for, saying “It was apparent very quickly that this was something we could utilize long-term.” Ryan and his team quickly got to work, creating five initial workflows that have now expanded to over 75, spanning tasks from onboarding and offboarding processes to automated archiving for compliance purposes. 

“Tray offers the flexibility and modularity we need to really accelerate the output of our small IT team. For instance, if we need a connector that’s not native to the Tray platform, we can leverage Tray’s connector builder to build custom integrations that support our partnership program. If we want to incorporate already-built workflows into a new automation, we can leverage Tray’s callable workflows functionality. It allows us to expand and refine processes without having to constantly reinvent the wheel.”

With user provisioning processes eating away at IT resources, Ryan and his team leveraged Tray to build a sophisticated automated onboarding and offboarding process. By integrating Okta with systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and JIRA, the team was able to dramatically reduce the amount of manual effort required to onboard or offboard new users. In total, they standardized Tray workflows across 10 business units, including Stamps.com, ShipStation, and ShipEngine.

“We have automated so much of the onboarding and offboarding process that we’re no longer spending valuable time on manual data entry. We even trigger several other automations around those processes, such as archiving users after a period of time or suspending inactive users. With Tray, we’re not only saving time, but we’re reducing risks.”

Implementing Tray at Auctane has been nothing short of transformative. Within three-and-a-half months, they achieved a 356% return on their investment, citing an annual savings of over $200k. Since adopting the Tray platform, Ryan and his team have seen a 30% productivity boost, reduced business risk, and 3x faster delivery velocity. Additionally, automating routine user provisioning tasks has saved the team 50 hours a month, allowing them to focus on more strategic initiatives. 

“Now that it’s all automated,” Ryan explains, “the team doesn’t have to worry about mundane processes and can really focus on things that matter. Tray lets us achieve more than what’s possible without it.”

Additionally, automating IT processes has reduced business risks significantly. By eliminating manual data entry, the chances of human error, especially in tasks like user provisioning, have plummeted. So not only is Ryan’s team working smarter and faster, but they’re also working safer.

“Our goal is to eliminate as many manual processes as possible, benefiting not only my team but other departments as well. With Tray, we can boost productivity across the organization and set every team up for success.”