HiBob Discovers 800 Shadow IT Apps & Cuts 22% of SaaS Spend

Customer Profile:

Founded in 2015 in Israel, Hibob is a leading HR technology company registered in the United Kingdom and with an office in New York City. Specializing in innovative people management solutions, their flagship platform, the Bob platform, streamlines HR processes, enhances employee engagement, and optimizes organizational performance, making HiBob a trusted partner for modern, people-centric businesses worldwide.

Challenges: The Pre-Torii Era

Historically, HiBob’s IT and procurement teams acted as SaaS gatekeepers for the rest of the organization. They would purchase key apps and assign licenses individually. Employees were encouraged to work strictly within these applications, requesting new ones when their needs weren’t met and waiting for the IT and procurement team to evaluate and onboard them accordingly.  

However, as HiBob continued to grow, they found that their current system was not scalable. As the company reached 900 employees, IT and procurement soon faced a bevy of challenges:

• New hires were unsure of which apps were sanctioned which resulted in an acceleration of shadow IT
• The company’s SaaS stack wasn’t able to meet the expanding needs of company employees 
• When an employee did request a new application, the process would take up to  several weeks to answer, slowing employee efficiency and ingenuity 

As a result of these mounting changes and challenges, HiBob faced a series of new SaaS challenges that they were only too eager to face head on. 

Shadow It Adoption Ran Rampant

Thanks to HiBob’s spike in new hires, a culture of shadow IT was noticed with employees routinely adopting freemium apps and charging costly subscriptions to their company credit cards—without reporting these actions to procurement or IT. 

Raveh Kahaner, the Head of Global Procurement, reflected on the past state of HiBob’s SaaS stack, “The CEO had asked me to look into our SaaS stack starting in 2022. We knew we had lost true visibility. The overall feeling was that our company was exploding with tools but we were missing insights into what apps were being used, which employees were using them, how much they cost, and whether or not they were needed. It’s impossible to manage the unknown and we knew we needed to protect ourselves from serious risks and draining our SaaS budget.” 

HiBob’s lack of visibility into shadow IT, let alone app usage, costs, and licenses, cast a cloud over their budget, risks, and operations. Even their offboarding processes were impacted as there wasn’t enough transparency overwhich tools had been used by former employees. 

SaaS Expenses Became Bloated

Without true visibility into their tech stack, HiBob faced unexpected renewals, inefficient spending, and challenges in strategically managing their SaaS budget.

The need to optimize application and license usage came into stark focus. Redundant apps created siloes and spiked SaaS expenses and multiple surprise renewals occurred every year. HiBob knew they needed to gain reliable transparency into their SaaS expenses in order to begin successfully planning and managing their SaaS budget.

The procurement team was tasked with painstakingly combing through expense reports to find erroneous and duplicate SaaS charges, allocating valuable time and resources to reactive processes—all with the goal of preventing further wasted spend but with no means to recoup what was already lost.

“When I joined the company, Finance pointed out that it looks like we had a tendency to auto-renew contracts and pay for licenses without ever questioning their value,” Kahaner reflected. “Auto-renewals would sneak up on us and we didn’t have the data we needed around contracts, adoption, and usage to rationalize our SaaS stack. We were aware of a considerable amount of inefficient spend, but lacked the necessary tools to address the issue.”

HiBob’s partial view of their SaaS stack didn’t only contribute to wasted spend but also slowed SaaS tasks. 

Limited Data Slowed Operations 

While procurement was tasked with sifting through expenses, their IT team faced a similarly daunting challenge. 

Without insight into which apps were used or who used them, IT had no way to standardize or automate many key operations—especially onboarding and offboarding. This meant they had to spend upwards of 1.5 hours manually onboarding and/or offboarding each employee across every known SaaS app in the organization.

Not only did these manual processes negatively impact new hires, preventing them from gaining timely access to the tools they need, but it also exacerbated offboarding risks.

With this in mind, HiBob decided it was time to implement a SaaS management platform. They soon found Torii was the perfect fit.

Why HiBob Chose Torii 

Driven by the need to regain control of their SaaS stack, HiBob turned to Torii. 

Torii’s robust discovery, optimization, and automation capabilities promised to: 

• Illuminate shadow IT with Torii’s secured browser extension and AI discovery and mapping capabilities, automatically revealing every SaaS app as soon as they’re adopted  
• Eliminate wasted spend by alerting IT of new SaaS expenses and providing procurement with unified contracts, and cost-saving insights and recommendations
• Save valuable time by automating any SaaS task with Torii’s canvas workflow builder and unlimited branching 
• Empower Hibob’s employees with distributed SaaS management and self-service features like Torii’s app catalog

   

“Today, Torii is my SaaS co-pilot. I wasn’t able to achieve my SaaS management goals without it. There really is no way you can effectively manage over 200 apps without a SaaS source of truth, and that’s exactly what Torii gives us,” said Kahaner. 

Illuminating Shadow IT:

HiBob anticipated discovering over a dozen Shadow IT apps, but the truth was far more sobering.

Torii’s secured browser extension and underlying AI discovery and mapping algorithm were instrumental in shedding light on the true extent of HiBob’s SaaS sprawl. The platform uncovered a whopping 800 shadow IT apps, including freemium and costly subscriptions.

Kahaner recalled his initial reaction, stating “After deploying Torii I was taken aback by the huge gap between the SaaS apps we were managing, how many we believed existed, and the reality. We knew we were struggling to account for all of our SaaS apps, but had no idea there were hundreds of them left unaccounted for. Torii gave us that visibility.”

Now, instead of tediously picking through expense reports to find user-adopted applications, IT can look at Torii’s Application page to see a full list of apps used across the organization, including their state (i.e. “discovered,” “in review,” “sanctioned,” etc.). What’s more, IT immediately receives emails and/or Slack notifications whenever a new application has been adopted and can automatically send personalized messages to end users requesting details.  

But that’s not all. Torii provides granular insights into application adoption and usage at both the individual and department levels. These insights provide IT with a clear picture of what tools are needed within the organization and by which team, helping to construct a sanctioned yet comprehensive SaaS stack to better empower employees. 

After understanding which apps were vital to employee success, IT was able to rationalize Hibob’s SaaS stack, removing redundancies and unused tech.

With Torii’s guidance, HiBob curated an optimized and secured list of just 200 paid-for applications that both aligned with employee needs and HiBob’s strategic goals.

Eliminating Wasted Spend:

Finance’s battle against wasted spend and surprise renewals found a formidable ally in Torii. 

After tackling SaaS visibility, HiBob’s procurement team had the insights they needed to begin mindfully rationalizing their SaaS stack.

“From a usage perspective, Torii was very helpful in spotlighting areas of inefficiencies,” Kahaner said. “Torii provided us with pointed recommendations for immediate cost-savings, highlighting redundant and abandoned tools, unused and over provisioned licenses, the list goes on. We were able to realize some big savings quickly.” 

After realizing these quick wins, HiBob turned their attention to larger, more systemic issues: their lack of transparency into SaaS expenses and contracts.

Luckily, Torii’s  deep integration with Netsuite transformed HiBob’s black-boxed SaaS expenses into a detailed cost-savings playbook. 

Today, Torii provides HiBob with a detailed analysis of their SaaS spend, down to the individual department and user. Torii also instantly flags any new expenses as soon as they occur. This way, finance can proactively manage erroneous charges before they’re posted to HiBob’s statements and spend the time once invested in manually auditing expense reports on more strategic initiatives.

This, plus Torii’s AI contract ingestion enabled HiBob to quickly unify all of their expense and contract data.

Within a matter of minutes, Torii’s AI contract ingestion uploaded over 35 contracts to HiBob’s platform, along with all of their line items and auto-renewal clauses. These contracts were then instantly reflected in HiBob’s dynamic renewal calendar. Now, HiBob can see all of their SaaS renewals at a glance, better planning their SaaS negotiations by leveraging Torii’s usage and adoption trends, cost-saving recommendations, and benchmarks.   

HiBob’s team also configured renewal workflows to send automatic reminders to all relevant stakeholders 90, 60, and 30 days prior to a SaaS renewal.

“Torii helped us put a stop to all of HiBob’s surprise renewals and get all of our SaaS apps off of employees’ company credit cards so renewals could be owned by procurement, ” Kahaner said. “We experienced tremendous results in cost-savings by initiating negotiations 90-120 days prior to renewals. Torii gives us more leverage and foresight for smatter, better, and cheaper renewals.” 

HiBob’s newfound transparency into their SaaS expenses resulted in a 18% SaaS cost reduction in 2022 and 22% reduction 2023. 

The results were clear, Torii was the financial co-pilot HiBob needed.

Automating SaaS Tasks:

Torii’s automation capabilities also helped to transform HiBob’s SaaS management processes.

Aside from automating application discovery and expense management, Torii also streamlined HiBob’s employee onboarding and offboarding processes. 

After gaining insight into which apps were critical for various departments, HiBob began to implement Torii’s app catalog, providing employees with the ability to request access to a list of already sanctioned applications.

Not only did this effort minimize shadow IT adoption, but it also increased employee satisfaction and efficiency as users spent less time searching for the tools they needed and more time on strategic initiatives.

“HiBob is constantly growing so it can be nearly impossible to manually track every app and license request, especially when they’re messaged to you. Torii’s application catalog is scheduled to be deployed by HiBob in 2024, helping to change this process,” remarked Batel Zamir, HiBob’s IT Operations and Procurement Analyst. “Instead of having employees request a license from an IT or a business owner that manages an App, we have them following a more reliable process that also adheres to HiBob’s provisioning policies.”

Torii’s automations also helped automate the employee offboarding process, automatically notifying App owners to confirm the removal of users from every application, including shadow IT, as soon as they left the organization. What once took over an hour and a half per employee was transformed into a zero-touch process, saving over 22 hours in offboarding time per month. 

“Torii’s workflow branching is fantastic,” said Zamir. “With Torii’s conditions, we can define users by departments, sub-departments, and even titles. This way we can meet the exact needs of HiBob and its employees.”

Now, IT can rest assured all of HiBob’s sensitive data remains secured and can easily prove compliance with automatically generated and robust audit logs.