CLARA, Inc.

Company and Department Roles

CLARA, Inc. specializes in cloud infrastructure development and operations, business consulting, and human resource services, primarily focusing on Japan and China. Since our founding in 1997, we’ve helped enterprises grow their cross-border businesses. Within CLARA, Inc., the Corporate IT Group, part of our Cloud Solutions Department, manages the company’s entire information system infrastructure. In today’s environment, where SaaS is widely accessible, our goal is to create seamless collaboration between people and systems, preventing the IT department from becoming a bottleneck.

Challenges in Managing Diverse SaaS Applications

For some time, we’ve used Questetra to manage account administration tasks related to employee onboarding and offboarding, ensuring smooth coordination with HR and other departments. However, the rapid shift to remote work following the COVID-19 pandemic led to a dramatic increase in SaaS usage, significantly increasing the workload associated with issuing new accounts. Although our processes were visible in Questetra, the actual configuration required manual work: accessing each service’s management interface, copying and pasting information, and executing commands. In a remote setting, checking progress through informal communication became difficult, leading to increased workload and communication issues.

This situation highlighted the need to automate account provisioning while maintaining control and minimizing reliance on manual intervention.

Why We Chose to Continue Using Questetra as the Foundation

Instead of replacing our existing tools, we decided to build upon Questetra to address these challenges. Questetra is more than just a workflow system; it provides robust control over complex tasks and inter-departmental dependencies. For example, our “Order Fulfillment Process” involves sales, contract management, finance, and multiple engineering teams (server, network, SSL), resulting in complex branching and parallel processing. Critical dependencies, such as not being able to bill until the server is activated, are deeply integrated into our operations. Managing these processes via email or chat inevitably leads to delays and errors.

Questetra allows us to directly define these cross-departmental handovers and parallel processes within the workflow, clearly outlining who does what and when. We explored other workflow systems, but none matched Questetra’s ability to represent and control such complexity, human decisions, and parallel execution. With this control as our foundation, we’ve successfully integrated automation to solve our current challenges.

Questetra’s Integration of Human-Centric Processes and Automation

Our focus was on avoiding complete automation. We aimed for a system that eliminates unnecessary manual tasks and data entry errors while maintaining control by incorporating human judgment and confirmation points within the processes. Instead of forcing a single system to handle everything, we adopted an architecture that leverages each tool’s strengths in its optimal location.

The architecture is designed with Questetra as the central hub, orchestrating the automated actions of various backend tools. The roles are divided as follows:

• Human Process and Progress Management: Questetra BPM Suite
• Notifications and Communication: Slack
• IT Task Management and Audit Logs: Jira Service Management
• Account Provisioning Automation Engine:Okta / Okta Workflows

HR initiates a workflow in Questetra, and upon approval, a ticket is automatically created in Jira via an API, triggering automatic account provisioning in Okta. Previously, these manual tasks introduced delays; now, results are immediately returned to Questetra upon completion, and HR is promptly notified.

Implementation Benefits

Integrating various SaaS tools using Questetra as a central hub has yielded significant quantitative and qualitative benefits. Preparing a new employee’s account, which used to take about a week, can now be completed in half a day. While automation through Okta and other tools is crucial, Questetra’s role as the process’s starting point allows us to directly transfer accurately entered HR data to each system, eliminating wasteful manual transcription steps and errors.

Improved real-time capabilities have also enabled progress visualization and bottleneck detection, creating an environment where we can confidently prepare for an employee’s first day.

Useful Features of Questetra BPM Suite

To further enhance integration with third-party SaaS applications, we actively use custom add-ons. In addition to integrating with external tools such as automatic task creation in Jira, we’ve tailored features to specific needs, such as supplementing Slack notifications with custom logic to accommodate holidays. This development is guided by internal guidelines summarizing Questetra’s unique implementation rules and characteristics. Employees have uploaded these guidelines to AI systems for enhanced usability.

As a result, the challenges of differing specifications and constraints that we previously struggled with have become far more manageable, enabling efficient development. We can now respond quickly to even the most specific needs of our users, demonstrating that Questetra’s flexibility to add business-specific add-ons is critical for maximizing its utility.

Process Control in the AI Era and Initiatives for Building the Next Era

In an era where AI manages repetitive tasks, we expect Questetra to function as the central hub connecting people, AI, and SaaS. We anticipate a future where AI handles processes while humans make final decisions.

Within this framework, expectations for Questetra are growing as a process platform that seamlessly integrates decisions among various SaaS, AI systems, and humans. Even if some tasks are replaced by AI, assuming that human judgment is always necessary at certain points when looking at the overall picture, the value of Questetra, which allows for overseeing and controlling the entire process, remains unchanged.

In line with CLARA, Inc.’s mission of building the next era, we will continue to partner with Questetra to develop business processes tailored for the future.