How Perk used Make to unlock internal efficiencies

Perk (formerly TravelPerk) is an intelligent AI-native platform for travel and spend, built to eliminate the hidden, manual tasks that drain productivity and morale - Perk calls these ‘Shadow Work’. Headquartered in Boston and London and with over 1,800 employees, Perk is trusted by over 12,000 companies globally to automate travel bookings, invoice and expense processing, and events. As a company built on the belief that automation should eliminate friction everywhere it exists, it was inevitable that Perk would look internally to see where the same mentality could deliver efficiencies. Gabriel Stock, Senior Engineering Manager at Perk, explains that before turning to Make, individuals within the company were using automation tools to remove laborious and time-consuming tasks - but there was an opportunity to enhance the overall structure and ownership.  

“Last year, we knew that we needed to empower all teams in the company - especially non-technical roles on how to make their processes more seamless.”

It was at this point that Perk discovered Make. 

“When we started comparing the different offerings, we saw what Make offered, how it looked, and we realized that it was easier to use, the learning curve was easier to ramp up, and Make came up with a lot of integrations out-of-the-box that made our lives simpler. And of course, the pricing was much better.”

So what exactly were the internal challenges that Perk was trying to overcome?

The challenges

As Perk scaled rapidly across multiple geographies, the engineering team needed to empower non-technical departments to own their own operational workflows, without diverting engineering resources away from the multiproduct platform. Make gave those teams the autonomy to solve their own problems, without needing to queue for engineering support.

“We realized that we were losing opportunities to optimize and make some of these processes more efficient. So we saw that Make allowed these departments to create their own automations and reduce their own work”.

Stock explains that he wanted to give these internal teams more autonomy. A key challenge was that these teams had some technical knowledge, but didn’t come from an engineering background.

“Because they know the domain, they know what their problems are, so they knew how to fix them - but they didn't have the tools. Some of these departments already had people building things with Slack workflows, macros in Google Spreadsheets, or Excel. So they knew they could use tools to simplify processes, but they didn't have a way to interconnect all these tools.”

The solution

Once Perk had made the decision to move forward with Make, Stock explains that they kicked off the deployment by offering training to individual departments. 

“When we started this initiative of offering Make to the internal departments, I was helping drive this initiative because to use Make, you need some knowledge about APIs, JSON, and so on. I helped teams understand this and coordinated the training.”

Stock explains that things could be a little chaotic at first - but as teams gained greater knowledge of Make, processes quickly improved, and Perk began to unlock the efficiencies they were looking for. As a result, the company is now moving towards a model where there are Make champions within key departments.

“We’re in the process of opening what we call ‘Automation Engineer’ roles,” explains Stock. “They’re not software engineers, but they are people with technical knowledge, a good understanding of how processes work, and how to map manual processes into automation. We want to build that role as ambassadors embedded into each department.”

The future

Looking to the future, Stock is focused on ensuring strong governance of Make usage within Perk to unlock the best possible outcomes. To do this, he’s looking to assign clear roles to each Make user and is encouraging best practice knowledge sharing within the company. For now, he’s clear on the core benefits of Make to Perk:

“It’s in enabling non-technical people to build things without the need of a software engineer. Seeing people solving their problems by themselves and owning the solutions is just the best thing.”