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What is automated employee onboarding for IT?

A recent study from HRIS vendor BambooHR found that 58% of new hires are frustrated by lack of access to essential tools, including SaaS applications. So, if your team is looking to improve new hire productivity by implementing automated employee onboarding to SaaS-based resources and hardware, or even change how your company approaches it, this article is for you.

Read on to learn about:

  • Automated new employee onboarding to the SaaS stack
  • How organizations gain from it, like saving money
  • Tips on scoping the complete onboarding process and requirements
  • Pros and cons of different tools to meet those requirements
  • Why the BetterCloud end-to-end SaaS management platform is the best choice to meet all your SaaS management and employee onboarding automation needs
Screenshot of BetterCloud's Google Workspace onboarding workflow

TABLE OF CONTENTS

What is automated employee onboarding?

Part of user lifecycle management, automated onboarding is the process of running orchestrated IT workflows to grant new employee and contractor access to the necessary SaaS apps and technology to do their jobs.

Benefits: Why trade manual processes for automated employee onboarding

Once developed, automation makes the user onboarding process fast, easy, and flawless. Every time.

Let’s quickly review the many benefits of automated onboarding.

  • Eliminated human error reduces risk. Each SaaS app has a different admin console with different types of permissions, giving rise to inconsistency making SaaS management ripe for mistakes.

    By automating new hire onboarding, workflows can systematically manage each user and each app. This always ensures consistent configurations, thereby keeping security posture high.
  • Operational efficiencies save IT time and money: Automation eliminates laborious, boring work associated with setting up accounts for each SaaS app admin console (that IT must learn), configuring settings, adding users to all their calendars, groups, files, Slack channels, and folders, individually ordering computers, and sending them out to an employee.

    Since automation completes all these tasks, IT saves time and since time is money, automation’s savings drop straight to the bottom line.
  • Easy compliance to documented security policy. By automating the IT onboarding process, when executed, logs show that your IT team followed procedures. Furthermore, never-expiring audit logs are always available to show onboarding happened as intended whenever you might need them.
  • Better employee productivity and a more welcoming experience. Employees get the tools they need to hit the ground running as soon as they start. Without delay, an employee boots up a computer, logs in, and they’re ready to contribute to the team.

For the organization, they get an instantly productive employee, while the employee gets a warm welcome and positive start to the new job.

Scope requirements: Steps for automating employee onboarding

So how do you get started with automating new hire onboarding? Of course, without the right IT tool, it’s not possible.

And to pick the right user onboarding automation tool, it all starts with requirements, which is rooted in defining steps to securely onboard new users to your SaaS stack.

Build workflows that include these steps

To get the IT portion of onboarding rolling, the process generally begins with human resources. Two ways can trigger it, depending on the exact HR tool an organization uses and the types of integrations those tools have.

  1. Once HR adds a new employee or contractor to a human resource system, like Workday or BambooHR, it can automatically trigger a zero-touch workflow to complete onboarding, or
  2. HR can physically submit a help desk ticket to an ITSM, which then triggers an alert to a SaaS management platform.

If you’re like most organizations, you probably perform these steps to bring new employees aboard:

  1. Order computer from inventory or from a vendor
  2. Ship computer to user or IT, depending on the new employee’s location
  3. Create user and configure settings in apps, including:
    • SSO or IDaaS
    • Cloud productivity suite like Google or Microsoft, including email
    • Slack
    • Meeting or video conferencing
    • Individual file storage like Box, Dropbox, or Drive
    • Specialized or business function SaaS apps, like Asana, Salesforce or Adobe
  4. Add user to all groups, calendars, and Slack channels
  5. Add user to shared resources like storage and folders
  6. Send personal welcome email to new employee by using dynamic field capability
  7. Send an email to the hiring manager confirming that the new user now has access to all resources.

By using a tool that can automate all these onboarding steps, and even add users in bulk at the same time, IT can spend less time on the mundane tasks and more on the strategic IT projects that help the business grow.

And the only manual IT work required?

Developing that automated workflow once, and with some maintenance time, it can run again and again.

Know your own process

When it comes to maximizing automation’s benefits in your SaaS stack, it’s important to use the tool that best supports a process. In onboarding, as demonstrated in the section above, getting new employees all the necessary IT and SaaS resources is much more than creating a new user in an application.

Rather, it’s a series of crucial actions that IT must perform to completely equip the user, and your tool should be able to efficiently create workflows to perform them all with a solid return on investment.

Consider IT onboarding automation options

You hear a lot about automating employee onboarding from a range of IT software categories. Many vendors claim to automate onboarding and user lifecycle management including:

  • Single sign-on tools (SSO) and Identity-as-a-service providers (IDaaS),
  • Integration Platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors
  • IT service management (ITSM) tools
  • Combo HR/IT/Finance tools
  • SaaS management platforms (SMPs).

Like every big IT product purchase, details matter.

How a tool works and how it helps you orchestrate automated workflows is important. That tool’s user experience is crucial because being easy to learn, create and manage IT automations speeds return on investment (ROI).

Buyers also need to look at the numbers of pre-built integrations, templates, and actions – and the subscription packages that are available. After all, these all impact the true costs and ROI of automation.

With that, let’s dig in and cut through the noise and confusion around various choices for automating new hire onboarding.

1. SSO/iDaaS Tools

The primary use case for these solutions is identity and access management to authenticate users into multiple SaaS applications with a single set of credentials.

SSO advantages

  • Meant for authentication, they have a many pre-built integrations
  • While not purpose-built for automating user lifecycle management, they can automate basics like app, group, email, and calendar provisioning

SSO disadvantages

  • Writing automations require more programming skill, as they tend to be low-code platforms, as opposed to no-code builders that any IT member can easily use
  • Automating the same task requires many more workflow steps compared to other tools, like SaaS management platforms
  • Running higher numbers of workflows becomes expensive fast; there’s a relatively limited number of workflows in license subscriptions, so expect big price increases as you move up from entry tiers
  • Executing both parent and child workflows count toward your subscription limit
  • Keeping costs reasonable forces organizations to allow fewer people to develop them, as opposed to building skills for the whole team

2. iPaaS solutions

The primary use case is enabling applications to use data that live in various places including multiple SaaS apps, on-premises applications and databases, as well as in that cloud. Residing in an enterprise’s data stack, iPaaS tools are very strong in point-to-point integrations to share data. They’re made of pre-built connectors, business rules, mapping, and transformations for developing and orchestrating data integration flows.

iPaaS advantages

  • Because of their primary use case, they have many SaaS app integrations
  • Can automate basic app provisioning

iPaaS disadvantages

  • Ingesting and analyzing app data works differently in an iPaaS, thus requiring more automation steps and more database queries to access user info (For example, an iPaaS workflow to provision three apps requires 14 steps and 2 database queries, compared to the SMP’s six steps and no database queries)
  • It’s simply a visual overlay for organizing and executing processes, as each query is manually added when building the workflow or orchestration, making user onboarding automation more time-consuming to build and to manage
  • Including more apps and tasks to scale iPaaS workflows, they tend to become very complicated
  • Constant database queries needlessly eat up bandwidth and exceed API call limits
  • Activity isn’t stored in never-expiring logs for easy auditing, nor are error handling notifications.

3. Combo HR/IT/Finance tools

These tools have a broad use case, as they aim to automate and eliminate manual administrative work involved with organizational operations combining HR, IT, and Finance apps into a single data platform. As such, it’s tough to name a primary use case.

Combo HR/IT/Finance tool advantages

Combo HR/IT/Finance tool disadvantages

  • Capability-rich but does nothing super well
  • Limited third-party integrations
  • Does not allow much customization
  • Creating workflows, like app provisioning, is overly complex
  • Suitable automated user onboarding for small organizations with no IT team, but with IT, it can prevent them from properly doing the job
  • Limited set of user onboarding actions, mostly oriented around HR-related tasks like learning management for employee training, so IT can’t do certain tasks critical to IT (For example, only HR can add/remove/change user accounts. As a payroll system, terminated people must retain access to their information, tax forms, and such. Since ex-users retain access, app deprovisioning must be manually complete)

4. IT Service Management (ITSM) tools

The primary use case is to help IT manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to users, ranging from designing, creating, delivering, and supporting IT services, resulting in improved enterprise efficiency and employee productivity.

Their focus in automated onboarding is not on SaaS provisioning, but on legacy assets, hardware, virtual machines, and cloud instances. However, there’s a wide field of ITSM choices and some automate new hire onboarding in the SaaS environment better than others.

ITSM advantages

ITSM disadvantages

  • Offering a "low code" workflow designer instead of no-code builder can make automating new hire onboarding to the SaaS environment complicated for non-developers and can require expensive consultants
  • Complicated licensing and packaging can lock you into them forever
  • Not focused completely on the SaaS environment

5. SaaS management platforms

The primary use case for these tools is to help IT automate manual SaaS tasks, optimize SaaS spend, provide file governance and security, and manage SaaS costs, apps, and user lifecycle management. Of course, this includes automating new hire onboarding. There are a lot of SMPs, but the best ones stand out because they have comprehensive and robust automation capabilities.

SMP advantages

  • Is purpose-built and optimized for automating the SaaS stack, some SMPs have built-in logic and operational intelligence around SaaS apps and users, which then require fewer workflow steps compared to other types of automation tools
  • Has an easy-to-use no-code workflow builder with a great IT user experience
  • Includes detailed automated onboarding process templates for fast and easy customization
  • Has a large number of pre-built integrations for the most commonly-used SaaS applications, including tools for IT management like ITSM, endpoint management tools, iPaaS, and SSOs for tighter operational integration
  • Meets unique integration needs is easy using a custom API
  • Can run on-demand or scheduled workflows, and allow workflow branching
  • Shows activity and reliable workflow execution via never-expiring audit logs
  • Provides maximum flexibility, you can use scheduled or on-demand workflows, as well as unlimited branching
  • Enables predictable costs, rapid ROI, and true IT citizen development thanks to unlimited workflows and unlimited integrations

SMP disadvantages

  • Many options to evaluate
  • There’s still a learning curve to automating manual onboarding, offboarding, and other repetitive SaaS management tasks your IT team does

All in all, choosing the right class of tools, and the best SMP for your IT team, requires that you understand your processes. Know onboarding steps, both your current and future state, and aim for a tool that is flexible enough to best meet user lifecycle goals now and into the future.

But as you embark on your onboarding automation journey, you’re certain to uncover new SaaS tasks to automate. This is why the obvious choice is an end-to-end SaaS management platform.

Better automation with BetterCloud

BetterCloud is the world’s most complete end-to-end SaaS management platform. Designed to help IT teams like yours, it manages all users, apps, and spend, as well as automates key processes like onboarding, offboarding, and SaaS-related help desk tasks.

As more than a user automation platform to ease SaaS stack management challenges, BetterCloud simplifies and enhances Google administration to eliminate the need for GAM scripting. BetterCloud also offers unmatched spend optimization and file governance capabilities, to keep your SaaS stack operating securely and cost-effectively.

Most importantly, our automation capabilities feature:

  • Easy-to-use, extensive and proven automation functions, so you don’t have to compromise between flexibility and control
  • A solid IT user experience to make writing and maintain workflows easy and efficient
  • More than 90 deep integrations to the apps you use
  • A large library of 1000+ actions, triggers, and templates
  • A no-code visual Workflow Builder make it easy to create and maintain workflows
  • Reliable workflow execution
  • Automatic ticketless help desk resolutions for users in Slack that never generate a ticket
  • Never-expiring activity logs for an audit trail
  • Great training, as well as customer support and customer success teams staffed with humans providing real help and problem-solving.

Ready to learn what BetterCloud can do for you right now?