How BARK Saved Over 2,000 Hours of Manual IT Work With BetterCloud

Last month, Elliot Grossman, Director of IT at BARK, joined us to share his SaaS automation story. He has used BetterCloud at three companies over the last eight years, and when he started at BARK, he was a one-person IT team buried in manual tasks related to onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle changes that kept him from his goal of elevating IT to strategic business partner within the organization. 

Gaining Executive Buy-In

In order to gain executive buy-in to bring BetterCloud into BARK, Grossman calculated how long it took to onboard or offboard an employee manually at the precise moment it needed to be done. In order to complete all these tasks, he would require an additional full time employee on his team. This calculation proved true. BARK saved 2,747 hours of IT time using BetterCloud workflows to automate manual tasks.

“If you’re going to hire more people, it’s going to be a strain on your budget. BetterCloud can make life easy for everybody.”

Elliott explained how streamlining manual tasks with BetterCloud didn’t just satisfy IT needs. The executive team was pleased with the financial savings and the compliance team was relieved to have confirmation that users were being deprovisioned appropriately and in an automated system that avoids human error. Finally, the IT team was building capacity, without building headcount and getting time back to work on strategic projects and improve their knowledge in new areas.

Focusing on Security

Beyond automating manual IT tasks, BARK’s IT organization was focused on security compliance and combating shadow IT within the company. During the webinar Grossman explained that shadow IT occurs when a department invests in an application and manages it themselves, without the approval or knowledge of IT. 

As a public company with compliance top of mind, the IT team needs to ensure these applications are offboarded as well. However, IT often doesn’t have admin rights to these apps. With BetterCloud’s offboarding workflow, IT is able to automate an email that will get sent to the app admin saying that an employee has been terminated, and requests confirmation that access has been revoked. “We have passed compliance every single time on applications we don’t even have our hands in,” said Grossman.

Up-Leveling IT with Expanded Capacity

As an IT leader, Grossman takes on great responsibility for his team, ensuring they are building skills to advance in their career. So what did he have them do with all of their time saved? Gain knowledge in other areas of interest, participate in training, earn certifications, and become proficient through broader IT experiences.

“I want my team to succeed. Denying the opportunity for professional development hurts career growth and makes employees less valuable in the long-term,” Grossman said.

On a personal level, Grossman takes pride in making sure automations are compliant to pass audits, saving his team time, saving the company money, removing the need to hire additional headcount, and retaining the existing talent on his team of three by making sure they enjoy their work. 

“Right now BARK has over 800 employees. I’ve seen the company grow from 300 all the way up. Being able to keep the amazing people on my team around as we scale is key for me,” said Grossman.

Watch the webinar recording here to learn more about the BARK IT automation story.

Ready to learn more about BetterCloud? Request a demo with a BetterCloud product expert today.