How Rippling runs IT: Preventing device performance issues
Monitoring the health of devices is critical for ensuring employees can work uninterrupted.
However, most IT teams are drowning in administrative work and stuck in a reactive rather than proactive state—leading to increased support tickets and decreased employee productivity.
At Rippling, we enable companies to get ahead of any hardware issues—especially for lean IT teams without the headcount to manually monitor device health.
This is possible thanks to a Rippling feature called Workflow Studio, alongside our native-built Device Management and Inventory Management solutions.
Workflow Studio is a native, no-code workflow builder that allows you to create custom automations across Rippling and its integrations. You can trigger actions based on any employee attribute or change to meet your organizational needs.
Below are three advanced workflows Rippling created as recipe templates to proactively address common device issues. You can find them by logging into your Rippling account and navigating to the Recipes app under Tools.
Issue #1: Battery needs to be replaced
This first workflow ensures laptops perform well by sending an alert when a MacOS laptop’s battery health is low and it’s due for a replacement.
You can customize the notification to suit your specific business needs. For example, we’ve set up this workflow to trigger an email when the Rippling agent identifies the laptop's battery health has changed to “Replace Now.”
We’ve put in the IT business partner as the recipient. Because Rippling is the single source of truth for workforce data, the system is smart enough to identify all current IT business partners instead of us having to enter names manually.
In the email body, we’ve also been able to insert dynamic variables into the message that will automatically pull in who the device is assigned to, the serial number, and what the battery health changed from. That way, your IT team has all the information they need within the email.
Issue #2: Low disk space
We set up this second example workflow to notify IT when an active device has less than 10 GB of space, so you can ensure devices don’t experience performance issues.
For this one, we chose to send an email again, but you can easily change this to whichever method you prefer.
In the body of this email, we’ve used dynamic variables again to pull in helpful reference information such as total free space available, who the device is assigned to, and that employee’s department and title.
This is another example of the benefit of having HR and IT within the same native system. Rippling is the single source of truth for all of this information, so the platform can dynamically pull the relevant data into the email for you.
Issue #3: Device is end-of-life
For the third workflow, we set up an automatic alert to IT and the relevant employee when a device is over three years old.
This is helpful if your company has a policy to upgrade employee laptops after a certain amount of time. While the template uses “three years,” you can customize the timeframe to match your company's specific policy.
Here, we automatically sent a Slack message to IT, the employee to whom the device is assigned, and the employee’s manager, letting them know they’re eligible for an upgrade. You can choose between sending the message to a public Slack channel, a private channel, a direct message, or a group message.
You also have the option to test the action for all workflows, allowing you to preview your message before sending it.
NOTE: This workflow does not automatically apply to computers in place before Rippling was deployed.
Replace devices with just a few clicks
With Rippling Inventory Management, you can easily replace devices with issues identified by the workflows above. Order a new device directly through Rippling or reassign a device from your existing inventory at one of our global warehouses. Then, you can trigger Rippling to send a prepaid shipping box to retrieve the old device from the employee.
