The days of small tech stacks have passed. Businesses now utilize an average of 130 SaaS applications, a significant increase from the eight applications used on average in 2015. 

However, when these applications are adopted in an ad-hoc manner, they can become siloed. These silos hamper your business efficiency and prevent you from making the most of your tools.

This is the challenge WeTransfer, an internet-based file transfer service, faced before they adopted Celigo. The team struggled to manage their growth without a scalable integration strategy. Discover how they addressed these obstacles with an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service).

Addressing SaaS sprawl

When Katia Malashyna-De Jong joined WeTransfer in 2021 as their financial systems director, she noticed the company was facing significant SaaS sprawl. The team had over 200 tools, but they weren’t able to interact with each other. 

This disconnect caused major problems especially between their customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Recognizing the need to integrate these systems, the WeTransfer team attempted to connect the two systems themselves using custom point-to-point integration. But after hundreds of hours over two and half years, they still couldn’t get the applications to work properly.

Without integrated systems, the team faced hours of manual data entry each month. This slow process caused delays in closing books and completing the billing cycle. The team decided it was time to look beyond their internal integrations and to find a scalable and effective solution.

Implementing a scalable solution

Celigo’s iPaaS proved to be the solution WeTransfer needed. The team began by connecting their CRM and ERP. By successfully integrating these systems, the team was able to automate their quote-to-cash process and accelerate time-to-close.

After successfully building their first integrations, WeTransfer continued to connect their systems, automating their fulfillment, data warehouse, and project management processes. These integrations allowed WeTransfer to refocus their teams from manual tasks to core projects like process improvements. 

The team is continuing to use Celigo to eliminate points of failure in their architecture. Thanks to Celigo’s robust solution the platform is ready to scale with them as they continue to grow. 

“The change with Celigo was noticeable right away. For the sales team to have financial data after they asked for it for two years, and it actually went comparatively easily, was a wake-up call for us. Everything that we promised to the users: it just worked. It was a huge success.”

– Katia Malashyna-de Jong, financial systems director, WeTransfer

3 key takeaways

WeTransfer was able to transition from ad-hoc, disparate applications, to strategic, enterprise-wide automation with Celigo’s iPaaS. Here are a few key insights from their success:

1. 1. Building point-to-point integrations is costly and time-consuming: WeTransfer originally tried to tackle their integrations themselves with custom point-to-point integration. This not only ultimately failed, it cost the team hundreds of hours. With an iPaaS, the team was able to quickly implement all their integrations on a single platform to save time and money.
   2. Obtaining reliable business data is critical: Data isolated in disparate systems impedes visibility, depriving leaders of the insights needed for informed decision-making. Retrieving this data often involves extensive manual data entry, requiring hours of your teams’ time. After integrating their systems, WeTransfer was able to automate these manual data reconciliation tasks and gain a real-time, holistic view of their data across systems. 
   3. Building an integration strategy ensures continued success: Ad-hoc application adoption and a lack of an integration strategy left WeTransfer with a variety of systems that didn’t work together. This prevented automation and hindered efficiency. In order to move forward in a way that was scalable, the team built an integration strategy. This enabled the team to be deliberate in investing in new applications and integrating these systems with the rest of their tech stack.

Explore WeTransfer’s story further and learn how they built a scalable integration strategy with Celigo in this case study.