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Martin Brodbeck
CTO, Sterling Backcheck
SuperNova Award Category:
The Company:
SterlingBackcheck is one of the world’s largest company focused entirely on background checks with offices in the United States, Canada, the U.K., India and the Philippines.
Since our founding in 1975, SterlingBackcheck has continually reinvested knowledge and resources back into the business. We deliver relentless customer service, unbeatable speed and unrivaled accuracy.
Our more than 2,800 employees serve over 20,000 customers, including a quarter of the Fortune 100. We like to think of our clients as close partners, which shows with our 92% client retention rate, unrivaled in the industry. It's because the SterlingBackcheck team believes strongly in providing the most comprehensive services possible backed up by a commitment to excellence.
The Problem:
We were using a combination of homegrown and open-source integration tools for automating transactions with customers. The technology was costly and hard to use, so we had to assign platform engineers to do the integrations. The integrations took several months to build and heavy customization meant almost everything was a one-off with little or no re-use.
Even worse, assigning our engineers to integrations took their time away from business-critical work on our core platform to add functionality and new services. Our competition began using APIs and other more modern technologies and was gaining momentum. We knew we needed to update our technology strategy to maintain our competitive edge.
The Solution:
The problem identified itself over time. We were assigning high value engineering resources to solve a set of integrations that kept compounding. We needed a more modern approach to data and application integration that would be faster and easier – ultimately letting us focus on our core business.
After looking at various vendors in the market, we chose SnapLogic for its integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). It gave us a single platform for batch, real-time and Big Data integration. The SnapLogic Elastic Integration platform offered high availability and resiliency, and we were able to outsource our integrations to the SnapLogic Services Team.
The Results:
Moving to an iPaaS instead of hand-building point-to-point integrations instantly transformed our technology strategy, allowing us to more directly support business and revenue goals. Custom integrations took several months to build. With the iPaaS approach we shortened the time it took to integrate data and applications from months to weeks, and therefore drastically reduced the time it took to onboard new customers.
Metrics:
The transformation provided by the SnapLogic iPaaS was outstanding. Onboarding of new clients could now be done in a matter of days. It was an instant efficiency improvement. Another key return was the ability to put 12 engineers back into higher-value tasks that ensure we stay competitive and deliver premium customer service.
The most important ROI from standardizing on SnapLogic was faster time to revenue.
The Technology:
SnapLogic Elastic Integration Cloud and SnapLogic Managed Services.
Disruptive Factor:
Telling a team of platform engineers we were taking something off of their plate was a tough sell. As with many technology projects, once these engineers realized they were able to shift to work perceived to be of higer value to customers and with more visibility, resistance fell away.
Shining Moment:
It was making our integration strategy - something that we honestly hadn't thought much about - a value-add rather than just a costly manual exercise.