Client: Our client is a US-based biotechnology company leveraging emergent technologies to develop more effective therapies and pharmaceuticals.
Challenge: Being a clinical-stage firm, our client has been expanding aggressively, with new hires joining the company nearly every day. These employees, contractors, and interns are managed through Workday, with product support provided by a third-party contracted to support the client’s HRIS solution. As a technology firm, our client has a robust IT Identity Access Management solution utilizing Microsoft Active Directory and Azure Active Directory, which controls employee access to various systems and applications. This solution is supported in-house.
The volume of work associated with the hire-to-retire process was rapidly overwhelming our client’s corporate IT team – to onboard an employee, a team member had to detect a new hire entering Workday, create a series of tickets in the Freshservice IT Service Management system based on the employee’s type and entitlements, manually create an AD User in Microsoft AD, assign the proper groups and software licenses to them, and close the Freshservice tickets after filling out the required details. Likewise, employee offboarding was just as complicated, with the added problem that involuntary terminations, which had to be processed immediately, were not being highlighted as urgent, and there would be a delay of some days before the regular offboarding workflow would deactivate this employee’s account.
In summary, the amount of errors, delays, and security risks involved with manually managing an employee’s IT presence was unacceptable to our client, notably as it would cause them to fail critical system audits.
Solution: Dispatch selected the Workato Integration Automation Platform as the most robust solution for this use case. Workato has pre-built connectors for Workday and Microsoft AD, reducing project risk and offering shorter time-to-value. Workato also has powerful security and governance capabilities essential for this type of workflow.
Working with the client’s Workday contractor, Dispatch designed and implemented an automation solution that used Workato as a central clearinghouse for employee data, ingesting a census from both Workday and Microsoft AD before onboarding, offboarding, or updating employees in Microsoft AD through a Workato-based logic engine. Freshservice tickets are automatically opened, populated, and closed as needed during this process, which requires no human intervention. The automation was intelligent enough to determine which set of scenarios a record fell under, completing the relevant workflow as appropriate.
In addition, Dispatch built-in faulty record detection to raise any Workday or Microsoft AD record irregularity to the corporate IT team. This fault-detection system ensured data hygiene, which the team could not perform manually before. To ensure the solution remained low-cost, Dispatch followed batch data processing best practices through the adept use of SQL so that the solution as delivered had a low task footprint and would remain functional even as the client continued to grow.
Outcome: The client received an automated IT Identity Access Management solution with robust data verification features. The corporate IT team no longer had to spend time manually onboarding and offboarding employees, with the attendant data entry, timeline, and data security risks. The automation efficiently and securely manages an employee’s IT footprint, with any errors or issues pushed to the team via notifications rather than having to be determined manually. The most impactful outcome was that our client is now audit-compliant, which is very important to them as a publicly traded company.
The client has come to rely on the automation solution and has been able to reassign team members previously managing the manual processes to more relevant work. This speaks to the level of trust they have with the solution and Dispatch in general. We have since further enhanced the solution to meet newly recognized requirements, and the modular nature of the solution allows for significant modification as the client grows more mature.
If your company faces IT access management issues, we can help define the problem and implement a solution, saving you time, money, and effort.
