Scaling internationally, but struggling logistically

Headquartered in London, Filtered is a Content Intelligence platform designed to help enterprise organisations master content chaos and effectively manage hundreds of thousands of overlapping L&D content titles.

The majority of Filtered’s 29 employees are based in the UK. But like many other remote organisations, Filtered has begun hiring further afield. With 7 employees overseas, and plans to continue growing internationally, Filtered requires solutions that can scale easily.

According to Cath Hammond, Filtered’s People Operations Manager, creating a consistent employee experience is crucial."We all work remotely, but need to work together as one, so it is not just the UK and then everybody else".

This attitude extends to Filtered’s equipment policy. They provide every employee with a set up at home, irrespective of where they work and their proximity to an office.

But where Filtered was struggling before was with the smooth execution of this policy. Their previous equipment partner offered an unreliable management system and service, according to Cath. Impacting the efficiency of their team, and quality of their onboarding experience.

“The platform that we ordered from was not good at all and it created issues for the team… things weren't delivered on time, or employees would receive two of something. Collecting anything was a nightmare”.

Off the back of these frustrations, Filtered turned to Hofy.

A fast-growing company with an unscalable system

Sastrify is a SaaS procurement solution, transforming the way digital-first companies discover, buy and manage their software and cloud subscriptions. By centralising information and communications, Sastrify helps hundreds of companies save millions on software and cloud costs.

Based in Spain and Germany, Sastrify’s workforce is fully remote. Or, as they like to call it, “remote-by-choice”. 

Initially, Sastrify’s teams were solely based in the DACH region. But since its founding in 2020, the company has scaled both rapidly and internationally. Now, Sastrify’s 170+ employees are distributed all across EMEA, and North and Latin America. 

To support the speed of expansion, Sastrify needed a solution that would maximize the efficiency of their People Operations, while putting employee experience at the forefront.  

But their previous solutions did not deliver.  

“We started using a provider in Germany, and soon a competitor of theirs who was able to ship Europe-wide.” Says Claudia Korenko, People Ops Manager at Sastrify.

“However, it was an extremely bad experience for both our People Ops team and employees. It created so much manual work and anger on our end, that we reached a point where we were just frustrated.”

Luckily, Claudia came across Hofy. 

Combining control with automation

Since partnering with Hofy, Claudia’s equipment headaches have become a thing of the past. 

“You would hear me complaining on a daily basis about our equipment issues with our previous provider. With Hofy, this simply stopped.”

This began with a smooth onboarding. Or, as Claudia sees it, the lack of onboarding - given how easy the Hofy platform is to use and navigate. “I can honestly say there was no actual onboarding phase. We simply started using Hofy without any need for assistance.”

Nowadays, the extent of Claudia’s “manual work” is deciding which Hofy Teams to add her new hires to. Her new team members are then auto-invited to order equipment from Hofy’s employee portal.

Claudia has created 8 Teams on Hofy, each with specific equipment catalogues. She’s not only created department-specific Teams (“Engineering”, “Design”), for roles that require higher spec tools. But also an “Executive” Team, to give senior leaders access to certain equipment. And “Phones” and “iPads” Teams, for employees eligible for these resources.

This set up allows Claudia to tightly control who gets what, while putting her new hires at the heart of the onboarding process.

“The platform is user-friendly for both admins and employees, which creates a great experience for our onboarding. And the process is far more efficient for us.”

Hofy has not only improved the efficiency of Sastrify’s People team. By syncing with Sastrify’s existing systems, Hofy has cut out cross-team, manual work.

 “We integrate our internal IT system with Hofy, which brings a lot of benefits for our IT onboarding and IT security.”

Rapid growth requires rapid change

Banked is a global payments network that powers real-time payments for consumers, businesses and banks. Headquartered in London, they are a team of 120+ remote-first employees globally - from Europe to Australia and the US.

At first, Banked could get by managing equipment in-house. The first 30 or so hires were mainly based in the UK, with a few in Europe. New starters in London could collect their laptops in person from the office, and it wasn’t too time-consuming to order laptops for those elsewhere. 

But then Banked entered a period of hyper growth and expansion into new regions. And at that point, Banked, realized managing in-house was unscalable.

“If we can't get the most basic of equipment to people, we can't hire them, we can't grow and we can't get what we need to get done.” says Jamal Issouquaein, IT Engineer at Banked. 

But getting devices to people was only the first hurdle. Where Banked really struggled was when things went wrong with those devices.

The headaches of global equipment repairs

Whenever an employee’s device had an issue, there was not only a huge time sink for both the employee and IT Team trying to troubleshoot the issue. But also a huge cost sink. 

“If the issue was catastrophic, and the repairs would take long enough to cause downtime, we would buy them a new laptop and the old one would be disposed of. Looking back, it was a little scary how much money we were wasting on repairs and equipment issues.” 

And then there was the effect it had on employee experience... 

“There were many difficulties. Employees had to find time - either in their working hours or personal time -  to go out of their way to an Apple store for a device repair. And for those who were in countries without a local Apple store, arranging repairs was even more challenging.”  

Knowing all of these issues would only intensify with growth, Jamal started exploring other options.  

Inadequate alternatives

Banked had a simple brief: find an equipment management solution that could scale with them. Jamal spoke to some potential suppliers, but was unimpressed with their arduous processes.

“One solution said they operate in any country, but we’d have had to go through a two week onboarding process just to spin up in a new country. And every time you add a new address into the system, an account manager has to go in and manually approve it - which is just bizarre.”

And then Banked found Hofy.