What do brands like AirBnB, McDonald’s, Netflix, Apple, and PepsiCo have in common?
These brands – and their visions and promises – are all instantly recognizable across today’s diverse mediums of print, digital, and media. What helps make that awareness happen? Their partnerships with TBWA Worldwide. As part of the Omnicom Group, TBWA is a global agency network helping world-class brands craft and share their stories.
TBWA – and its more than 300 ad agencies around the world – prides itself on making brands come to life. However, as the company acquired more ad agencies across the globe, its level of customer service and experience began to vary. This growth resulted in a need for the company to streamline its agency and employee account management and provide real-time access to the software needed to make this happen.
When hand-coded APIs couldn’t keep up
Initially, TBWA’s identity management team fulfilled the requirements of giving employees access to the necessary software tools with manual API creation, or in other words, by hand-coding APIs. However, when the number of integration requests grew and became increasingly time-consuming TBWA realized its employees would have to wait longer for access if it continued to add more ad agencies to its network.
The identity management team was also tasked with the tall order to migrate all 11,000 employee email accounts and systems from Google Suite to Microsoft Office 365 in less than 30 days. Although the objective was attainable, the desired timeframe was unrealistic.
“Hand-coding to the Office 365 APIs in that time frame wasn’t going to produce a sustainable solution,” said Andy McCown, Director of Software Development at TBWA Worldwide. The team would have easily taken more than 30 days just to learn the characteristics of the Office 365 API and create APIs to build the connections.
McCown originally used an API management tool to ease the creation of Microsoft Office 365 APIs that unfortunately did not deliver as advertised. “We were stuck and couldn’t get people up to speed with this API management tool,” said McCown. “It would have taken us more than 90 days to complete the migration, and that was when I called SnapLogic to speed up our project.”
How API creation delivered a faster completion time
McCown’s team of three developers effortlessly created and exposed APIs through the SnapLogic EIC platform – creating APIs that would have taken weeks using any other method or tool. In fact, they completed their Google Suite to Microsoft Office 365 migration on time, 67 percent faster than they would have if they had created APIs by hand or using their previous API management tool.
Long after the company-wide migration project, McCown’s team continues using SnapLogic for API creation, seeing a 3X gain in productivity by his team. “SnapLogic has changed how we approach API integrations, allowing us to create APIs in hours, not weeks,” said McCown.
Learn more about how TBWA used SnapLogic for API creation and to handle their integration challenge.
