How Springboard Collaborative Unified Their IT Ops with Rippling

The Challenge

The Problem: 5+ Systems, Zero Visibility

Before Rippling, Springboard was patching together their IT environment with a variety of tools. Device inventory lived in spreadsheets and FreshService. Onboarding was fully manual, handled entirely by IT. And deploying new devices or redeploying used ones required one of the team’s technical support associates – the only one based in Philadelphia, where Springboard is headquartered – to make regular trips to the office to factory reset, clean, and ship out laptops.

The breaking point came when devices started simply falling off IT’s radar. "It was when laptops started not being present that should have been," Mark recalls. "That was the moment."

Beyond the physical security issue, the team was flying blind. Mark and Felix joined Springboard after many of the devices in rotation had already been deployed, so they didn’t have a good sense of the inventory that predated their arrival.

Felix describes the manual work of establishing even basic information about a given user’s device.

The Solution

The Solution: One Platform to Replace Five

When Springboard moved to Rippling IT, the immediate win was consolidation. Five separate systems — each requiring its own learning curve, its own maintenance, its own slice of the team's limited bandwidth — collapsed into one. Springboard’s IT team now oversees all their devices, both Mac and Windows, from a single MDM dashboard. Onboarding and offboarding workflows, previously manual and IT-owned, are now initiated by HR, automatically provisioning the approved software to every user.

Mark points to their recent VPN rollout as a concrete example of what that efficiency looks like in practice. Rolling out new software to 125 remote employees used to mean scheduling individual or group sessions, writing installation documentation, and following up with the stragglers who missed those communications. 

And because Rippling already had a pre-built integration with that particular VPN tool – one of 600+ integrations ready to go within the platform – the whole experience was painless. 

With Rippling, Mark was able to remotely deploy the installer package to every device in their fleet at once. Five minutes later, every employee had what they needed.

On the inventory side, device storage went from a little-used office space to Rippling's warehouse. And that turned time-consuming trips to the office into fully remote deployment, allowing any member of the team to execute it in minutes. Mac devices auto-enroll in Apple Business Manager on their first bootup.

On the compliance side, Rippling IT has also become an asset in working with Springboard’s many school partners. With security requirements varying widely between states, cities, and individual districts, Mark can now point to a range of reporting and security capabilities to satisfy the data protection proof points that are asked of them by partners. All the better, he can do that quickly, drawing from automatically generated logs within Rippling.

What that all accrues to is time saved, which allows Springboard to focus on the strategic cybersecurity work that can better protect the organization from threats. 

"Over the past year, security’s been a large focus for us,” Mark says. “Anytime we can get back time to devote to activities related to that has been immensely valuable."

Felix estimates that all the tasks which used to require coordinating across six different systems – inventory status, deployment, software provisioning, etc. – now happen in one place. 

"We could spend an entire day just trying to figure out deployment and shipment and adding people to certain systems. That has freed up a lot of time for our team. I cannot state that more."