About PathAI
PathAI is a trailblazing company fusing pathology and artificial intelligence. Through its proprietary algorithms, PathAI is supporting a future where every patient receives the same opportunity for a better, faster diagnosis.
Executive summary
PathAI is all about efficiency and innovation. To keep up with the rapid pace of change, PathAI encourages its team to avoid tedious manual tasks and embrace the power of infrastructure as code (IAC).
After using Tines, PathAI’s security team quickly recognized the potential for the no-code platform to transform many of the company’s more cumbersome IT processes, including onboarding and offboarding.
The challenge
Zach Perry, Information Technology System Analyst at PathAI, explains: “I came on the team not too long ago, and one of the first things I noticed was the need to improve consistency when onboarding new engineers to the team because there were so many projects occurring and we ran into risks of non-compliance.”
“There is a huge push within the company for IAC - so, anything that can be done with code is, and we seek to avoid repetitive manual work that is often at risk of human error.”
However, Zach was familiar with the risks that come with code. “Initially, my main goal with Tines was to emulate what had been created in Python because it was so complex, it could go wrong easily, and no one else understood it apart from the person who built it. We needed to remove the opportunities for human error and get reports when necessary.”
While the partially automated processes solved some problems, they introduced even more challenges:
Lack of scalability and repeatability
Complex, cumbersome code that few understood
Highly error and bug-prone
Little to no reports and logs
PathAI’s Head of Security, Pablo Vega, built on this explaining, “Before Tines, the challenge was that we had to set up infrastructure in AWS and write Python scripts. I can code, but the complexity of the processes being automated this way made for a cumbersome undertaking.”
Why Tines?
The team did a bake-off with a few competitors but ultimately implemented Tines. Tines no-code automation solves their main challenges and provides room for them to evolve their processes over time.
Consistent, repeatable processes
Intuitive interface and user experience
Audibility via reporting and error logs
Compared to the competition, Pablo expressed, “Tines made it easy for us to build, change things around, and build things on top of it without having to worry about which AWS account it’s running on or managing secrets - everything is in a separate environment and simplified - it’s a lot less work and much more readable for anyone who isn’t a software developer.”
Pablo adds: “In terms of both pricing and platform flexibility, Tines won out.”
There was a big push internally to automate more of PathAI’s onboarding process because while the IT team was doing its best to ensure new employees had access to what they needed, they weren’t always successful.
Starting with onboarding
“In our AWS world, we have many groups set up perfectly - you get assigned to a group, and you get access to what you need,” says Zach. “The problem was adding users to the correct groups and ensuring the process was uniform across the board because, before, it was ticket-based.“
“We previously had a YAML file, which was very hard to maintain with Python and didn’t make sense. I worked with the Tines team to create squad resources, which contain more granular groups and are very easy to maintain. Now, these are kickstarted by a Tines form behind SSO so we can ensure they’re a user within our organization and should have access to our environment. No one can mess with it or type things incorrectly. Once we input the details from our People Team, it checks if the new hire exists in the system and assigns the user to a squad; then Tines will go through and add them to the groups they need. It creates a ticket in Jira with all the specific details and variables with time stamps - this helps with our compliance audits.“
PathAI’s onboarding story saves them approximately 45 minutes per request compared to manual processes.
More important than the time saved per request, Zach explained that the qualitative benefits of avoiding repeat work is the difference. Tines allows PathAI uniformity across processes, and that uniformity provides them with repeatability and audibility that you simply don’t have with manual processes.
When they introduce changes, those are reflected for all users with access to a tool immediately vs. hours on a one-by-one basis.
“Before, no matter what, something would go wrong and break. Now, it’s all automated. It’s given me a source of truth to expand on and made us seem way more organized - honestly because we are. We just get to enter a form, and it’s done!”
Zach Perry, Information Technology System Analyst
One of the team’s favorite Tines features is reporting and error logging. This enables them to pinpoint where, when, and why a process broke, which saves them so much time and frustration.
Zach adds, “The reporting and having that info is also very reassuring from an audit point of view - knowing where things went wrong, when someone got access to something, or their access got taken away, et cetera. It gives me peace of mind.”
Then, iterating with offboarding
Beyond the onboarding, their IT team implemented another story to facilitate their offboarding in a secure, compliant, and time-efficient way. The story they implemented was nearly the reverse of their initial onboarding workflows, with some modifications, of course. What’s groundbreaking here is that this process couldn’t even be automated using the previous approach.
“Our offboarding is on a timer, so I’m not stressed anymore about how much time it will take. As our company evolves, we've had urgent requests to both on- and offboard larger groups of employees very quickly. Normally, because we have a stretched team whose task list never gets to zero, these events would cause us to deprioritize other critical work.
Today, we're not stressed anymore about how much time it will take. All we had to do was enter the employee's details and schedule the Tines story and the day and time to execute the task. Without that, our ability to on- or offboard 25 people simultaneously would have been impossible and far from ideal from a security and compliance standpoint.”
What's next?
PathAI’s next big goal is to evolve its existing processes further. “Now that we have all the rules and automation built, we can focus on eliminating most or all of the remaining manual processes. On top of that, move towards becoming a more strategic partner with our HR function to even identify new processes to make onboarding more seamless.”
It’s safe to say, PathAI is just getting started with what their teams can achieve with Tines.
