5 Essential IT Workflows - Onboarding, Licenses, Renewals

How can IT teams uncover 600 hidden apps, cut wasted SaaS licenses by up to 53 percent, and save $700,000 at renewal? Discover the five essential workflows that eliminate silos, streamline onboarding and offboarding, and turn messy renewals into predictable savings. See how data you can trust powers app discovery, access requests, and smart license reclamation for real cost control.

In this video, John Baker shares five proven workflows to discover apps, automate access, and stop waste. Follow a practical path that tackles bad data, silos, and tool sprawl, using Torii’s canvas builder, trusted integrations, and AI contract parsing to trigger nuanced actions across Slack, email, Okta, Google, and Jira. See real results, including 600 unknown apps uncovered, about 90 percent less manual work on access requests, 1.5 hours saved per onboarding, and $40,000 to $700,000 in renewal savings, making this a must-watch for IT, procurement, and security teams facing shadow IT, rising SaaS costs, and messy renewals.

This article was originally a video (YouTube link here). Below is the full transcript:

Hi, I’m John Baker and today I’ll walk you through five essential IT workflows and automations. We’ll focus on practical workflows that drive IT efficiency and reduce wasted spend.

Before we start, a few housekeeping notes to help everyone stay connected and avoid audio issues. Please use computer audio rather than the telephone, and keep microphones muted to limit background noise. Ask questions via chat or the Q&A, and participate in the polls since we’ll hold a raffle at the end for those who answer all poll questions.

Today’s agenda covers barriers to automation, five core IT workflows, and a live demo of Torii’s workflow engine. We’ll review barriers to automation and strategies to address them. Then we’ll cover five essential IT workflows and practical principles you can apply regardless of the tools you use. I’ll demo Torii’s workflow engine and we’ll close with questions and answers.

Before we begin, we asked where your organization is in its automation journey. The poll options were: no automation and no plans, no automation but planning to start in the next year, up to 20 percent of SaaS operations automated and looking to expand, or more than 50 percent automated. Thank you to everyone who responded.

Forbes recently outlined five common barriers that slow automation efforts in organizations. First, insufficient data, meaning the data doesn’t exist, you lack access, or you can’t trust its accuracy. Second, inaccurate or untrusted data prevents confident automation. Third, organizational silos across people, processes, and systems block communication and automation. Fourth, no single platform or ready-made tool covers the whole organization, so many point solutions fall short. Fifth, teams add complexity too quickly, treating automation as another tool rather than rethinking how people and processes work together.

Poll results show many respondents are mid-journey, planning to start within a year or already automating up to 20 percent and looking to expand. Siloed processes and systems were the most common barrier cited, which makes sense given how organizations often form organically by team.

We’ll now review five essential workflows that drive better IT visibility, cost control, security, and faster access. The first is new app discovery. Shadow IT is common, as people add the tools they need to get work done. This workflow automates uncovering newly adopted apps and vetting them so you maintain visibility and control.

Next are onboarding and offboarding workflows that make access timely, secure, and auditable from hire to exit. These workflows ensure the right access is provisioned from day one and removed promptly when employees leave. This improves security, reduces wasted spend, and supports employee retention.

Third, access request workflows give employees a single place to request sanctioned applications and track approvals. This workflow gives employees a place to request tools, prevents uncontrolled shadow IT, and provides a repeatable approval path. Research shows 42 percent of millennials would consider leaving an organization due to substandard technology, so having a fast, reliable request process matters for retention.

Fourth, reclamation workflows find and reclaim unused SaaS licenses to cut unnecessary spend and waste quickly. Many organizations pay for licenses that people do not use. HelpNet Security reports that 53 percent of SaaS licenses are wasted, and an additional study estimates $23 billion in annual SaaS spend reduction opportunities go unclaimed. Reclamation workflows help you identify inactivity and take appropriate action.

Fifth, contract renewal workflows track end dates, auto-renewal clauses, and owners so teams can act ahead of time. Contracts impact budgets, procurement, and renewals. Automation here ensures you are aware of upcoming renewals, auto renewal clauses, and owners so you can act rather than miss savings opportunities.

You can now see the poll about your organization’s automation priority. The options were shadow IT discovery, employee management such as onboarding and offboarding, license management, cost savings through license and app optimization, and renewal management. In our session, 55 percent prioritized cost savings and license optimization, and 27 percent prioritized employee management.

With that in mind, I will introduce Torii and demonstrate some of these workflows. We begin in the application view, which shows applications, expenses, usage, and active contract value. Torii aggregates multiple data sources like Azure, Salesforce, direct integrations, and a browser extension that detects signups with corporate email, so you can trust the data and act with confidence.

First, reclamation workflows help you prioritize apps by cost and usage so you can cut waste without disrupting work. You can prioritize applications by cost and utilization, then set inactivity periods, for example 60 or 90 days. Torii’s canvas workflow builder supports conditional branching. For example, you can check job title in BambooHR to identify C-suite users, or Okta groups to identify leadership. For C-suite users you might send a Slack notification for awareness and take no action. For leadership you might send an approval request via Slack with buttons to reclaim or retain the license. For non-leadership users, you might automatically deprovision after the inactivity threshold. This lets you apply nuanced rules based on role, price, and activity.

Next, discovery workflows keep an ongoing watch for newly adopted apps so you catch shadow IT early and assess risk. Torii constantly monitors your environment for new apps and can notify the right person via Slack or email. You can automatically send the user a request-for-information form populated with personalization tokens. The form can capture owner, cost, compliance details, and more. You can branch on form responses; for example, if the annual cost exceeds $1,000, notify finance. These automations remove manual back-and-forth and preserve context. One customer discovered 600 previously unknown applications after connecting Torii.

Onboarding workflows can be triggered based on BambooHR new hire dates and scheduled to run at a specific time, such as 6 a.m. local time on the hire date. Workflows can create Google Workspace accounts, provision Slack access, and add users to department-specific groups. Integrations with SSO and identity providers ensure users have the tools they need from day one. This improves security posture, reduces wasted spend, and enhances employee experience. One customer, Productboard, automated over an hour and a half per onboarding.

Offboarding workflows operate in real time for Google Workspace and Okta. Triggers include user archive, suspension, deletion, or org unit changes. Offboarding actions can rename or suspend email, transfer data and calendar events, sign users out of sessions, deactivate Slack accounts, and call APIs or webhooks. You can configure immediate deprovisioning for critical apps and delayed workflows for lower-priority apps, and monitor progress on an offboarding dashboard to ensure nothing is lost.

Access request workflows are supported by an application catalog where employees request sanctioned apps. Access request policies let you build different workflows per app. For example, a Salesforce request from sales or marketing can be auto-approved and provisioned immediately, while requests from other teams can route to a manager for approval. These policies reduce manual work and speed access for users. One customer reduced manual time on access requests by about 90 percent.

Contract renewal workflows trigger when a contract end date is within a set window, such as 90 days. Workflows can branch by whether the contract contains an auto renewal clause and notify the owner or finance with clear next steps. Torii includes AI ingestion that parses uploaded contracts to extract terms, dates, owners, and renewal clauses, and populates the renewal calendar automatically. This enables proactive renewal management and measurable savings. One customer, HHP Berlin, reported continuous savings of about $40,000 per renewal period, and another customer, Paxful, realized over $700,000 in savings by optimizing renewals.

To wrap up, here are product notes and Q&A highlights about triggers, integrations, and scheduling. Torii supports parent and child workflows, so a workflow can trigger another workflow. Triggers include user events, application discovery, license thresholds, and contract criteria, and they derive from sources like BambooHR, Okta, Azure, and other integrations. Workflows can be scheduled and configured to respect multiple time zones. Notifications and approvals work with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email, and Torii integrates deeply with Jira for two-way automation.

If you want to explore further, visit toriiHQ.com under Product, Workflows, for a directory of workflow templates and customer stories. We also host weekly SaaS management demos on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Eastern. Upcoming events include a deep dive webinar on agentless desktop discovery on April 10, and Torii will sponsor an industry event in late April, so please stop by our booth if you attend.

Thank you for joining today’s session; we appreciate your time and participation. If you have further questions, please reach out to Torii, and on behalf of Tracy, the rest of the Torii team, and myself, have a great day.