Integrations became configuration, not projects.

Plaid runs Workday as its system of record. The People Systems team owns all Workday integrations, with Mercer as a service partner. Before Aragorn, Plaid was not short of expertise. They were short of a layer that turned each integration into something other than a one-off project.

Every integration was a standalone build. A one-way feed: roughly 40 hours of work. A bi-directional feed: 80 to 90 hours. Each integration touched 4 to 6 stakeholders: People Tech, the vendor, FP&A or Benefits, IT for SSO and networking, and a consultant when capacity required.

End-to-end timelines were measured in months. Costs ran up to roughly $10K per integration when consultants were involved. Visibility was limited to Workday reports and individual vendor dashboards. When a feed failed, the team often heard about it from a vendor notice or an employee complaint, then had to reconstruct what happened.

The team evaluated three alternatives: Workday Studio, generic iPaaS platforms, and more consultant-built feeds. None solved the scaling problem. Studio remained code to maintain. iPaaS required modeling HR concepts inside a generic platform. Consultants kept the expertise outside the team.

Aragorn was different in a specific way. It is built around People data models, with native use of Workday RaaS reports and People events as triggers. People Tech can align Aragorn custom fields with Workday report fields directly, without filing a ticket.

Plaid stood up core Workday connectivity, security (ISU and security group), and initial projects quickly. The first production wave was benefit carriers. Five to six went live in under a quarter. The team was People Tech and Benefits. No external consulting on the initial integrations.

Plaid runs Workday as the system of record for hires, terminations, and requisitions. Backfill decisions, where a manager decides whether to refill, downgrade, delay, or close a role after a termination, were the most coordination-heavy of those workflows.

The pre-Aragorn process was email-driven. Managers emailed headcount aliases or specific FP&A contacts. Templates and approval paths varied by department. Approvals lived in email threads. FP&A often initiated and approved requests, creating segregation-of-duties concerns. People Ops and recruiters were repeatedly pulled into email chains. There was no single report for backfill status.

The team built two Workday RaaS reports: Create Backfill Job Req and Close Position. Aragorn projects pull from those reports four times per day. Integrations run hourly to create requisitions or close positions in Workday as appropriate. Managers receive a Workday backfill questionnaire task and choose to backfill, downgrade, delay, or close the role. Approvals route automatically to Function Leads and FP&A.

A team lead sees an employee terminate in Workday. Within a few hours, the lead receives a backfill questionnaire task with four options. The decision routes to Function Lead and FP&A for approval. If approved as a backfill, an Aragorn integration creates the requisition on the next hourly run. No email. No spreadsheet. Audit trail in Workday and Aragorn logs.

Plaid had Workday. Plaid had ownership in People Systems. The integrations weren't broken. The system that connected them was missing.

A typical integration required 4 to 6 stakeholders. People Tech designed and built. Vendors provided specs. FP&A or Benefits weighed in on data flows. IT handled SSO and networking. Mercer or another consultant came in when capacity required.

Coordination across that group, not technical complexity, was the dominant cost. Coordination is time delay. Each handoff added days or weeks. Coordination is cost. Each consultant engagement ran up to roughly $10K. Coordination is a scaling bottleneck. Each new integration repeated the cycle.

The five to six benefit carrier integrations delivered in under a quarter is the operating-model proof. The first one was a project. The next five were configurations. People Tech owned each of them. That describes a different function. Before Aragorn, People Tech designed, then waited for consultants and IT, then operated something they hadn't fully built. After Aragorn, the same team holds the whole loop.