When you’re onboarding 150 employees a month, there’s no room for a slow start. For one of the largest investment firms in the US — with more than 10,000 employees — ensuring new hires have the collaboration tools they need on day one isn’t just an IT goal. It’s a business requirement.
That’s exactly what they achieved by connecting Flow with ServiceNow.
The Backstory
Managing collaboration at this scale is complex. This firm runs a UC&C environment spanning Cisco UCM, Cisco Unity, Webex, Microsoft Teams, and AudioCodes — with Workday as their HR system of record. To bring it under control, they turned to Flow.
With Flow in place, the UC team could manage provisioning, deprovisioning, and user lifecycle changes across every system from a single platform — including writing data back to Workday automatically. It worked well. But as the team looked at their IT broader workflows, they saw an opportunity to go further.
The Opportunity: Zero-Touch Onboarding
The firm already used ServiceNow to manage IT service requests. The UC team handled provisioning through Flow. Both systems were doing their jobs — but they weren’t connected to each other.
That meant every new hire triggered a manual handoff between teams: a ServiceNow ticket on one side, a provisioning task in Flow on the other. At 150 onboardings a month, the overhead added up fast.
The team saw a clear path forward: connect ServiceNow to Flow and eliminate the handoff entirely. The goal wasn’t to fix something broken — it was to reach something better. True zero-touch onboarding, where a new hire is fully provisioned the moment their request is approved, with no manual steps in between.
What made this achievable was Flow’s existing integrations. Without Flow, reaching zero-touch onboarding would mean building and maintaining separate custom integrations between ServiceNow and each individual system — Cisco UCM, Cisco Unity, Webex, Microsoft Teams, AudioCodes, and Workday. Six integrations to build, secure, and keep up to date. Flow collapsed all of that into a single connection.
The Solution: One Workflow, End to End
The team connected Flow and ServiceNow to build a fully automated onboarding workflow. Here’s how it works:
- A new hire triggers a ticket in ServiceNow — automatically, via Workday
- The request is reviewed and approved in ServiceNow
- Flow receives the request and provisions the employee across the UC&C services defined for their role, including routing profile as needed
- Flow writes back to ServiceNow and Workday with the assigned phone number and confirmation
No manual handoffs. No re-keying data. No waiting.
The firm uses Flow across several other automation workflows, but this onboarding integration is where the impact is most visible. Every step that used to require human intervention now happens automatically — and consistently.
The Results: What the Firm Gained with Flow + ServiceNow
With zero-touch onboarding in place, the results were immediate. With 150 employees onboarded every month, the efficiency gains add up fast:
- 35 minutes of manual work eliminated per employee onboarded — that’s over 87 hours saved every month, and more than 1,050 hours a year just for a single use case
- Mean time to resolution (MTTR) dropped from days to minutes — what once required back-and-forth across teams now resolves the moment a ServiceNow request is approved
- Standardized data across all systems — Flow’s write-back to ServiceNow and Workday ensures every record is accurate and consistent from the moment onboarding begins
- Guaranteed day-one readiness — new hires arrive with everything they need, every time
Flow’s API integration with ServiceNow is what makes this possible. Rather than treating UC&C provisioning as a separate process, the two platforms work as a single, connected workflow. When ServiceNow approves a request, Flow acts — no human-intervention required.
For a firm onboarding at this scale, that reliability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the baseline.
If your onboarding process still relies on manual steps between your ITSM platform and your UC&C environment, you’re carrying risk you don’t need to. Errors, delays, and frustrated new hires are the symptoms — disconnected systems are the cause.
Flow and ServiceNow, working together, close that gap.
Want to see how it would work for your team? Request a demo or contact us to talk through your environment.
