HR Pulse

Wouldn’t you prefer your new employees to be productive from their first day?

An automated user account management function reduces your dependency on paper, creates a more secure environment, and puts employees to work faster than manual intake processes.

It’s the same at nearly every company. At any new employee’s desk, you’ll find nearly all the tools they need to be successful in their new job, including pens and notepads, a phone of the highest quality and capability, as well as the newest laptop and smartphone.

However, there’s one thing that will keep this employee – let’s call her Sarah - from getting to work: Access to the systems she’ll need to actually do her job.

Although Sarah’s officially a new employee at the company, and the HR department took the proper steps to make sure everything was set up for her to do her job, none of the internal systems at the office recognise her as such so she doesn’t have a user account and can’t access the applications she needs to make her first day at work a success.

So, she sits. Excited to begin working, but awaiting instruction, she wonders what to do in her new role. Apparently, the paper forms granting her access to her new employer’s work systems are stuck somewhere in the organisation’s backlog and need to be approved by a managing director.

Most likely, however, is that when the forms are found, the company’s systems administrator will have to wait for the managing director’s approval to be able to create the user accounts she needs to perform her role.

Eventually, she’ll receive access to the systems required to perform her role, but time will be lost – in some cases, as many as several days – and her fresh energy may turn to lethargy, with her first burst of passion gone forever.

Unfortunately this is not an isolated case

You’ll find similar examples in a great many work environments across almost every sector. Antiquated paper processes drive employee-intake procedures that most organisations use when they bring on a new employee. Fortunately, these processes are probably short lived as these are time consuming and error prone as most manual data entry processes are.

The amount of time and the variety of tasks involved in user account management makes conducting a paper-driven process nearly impossible to carry out uniformly and securely in a manual manner.

With many other internal processes becoming automated, organisations are able to streamline the user account management processes with other systems while doing away with the inefficiencies of paper-based systems.

Efficient and easy-to-use solutions exist to take on this task

Doing away with the manual intake also does away with such problems as illegible hand writing, missing information and miscommunication, just to name a few.

You should now be asking yourself if your new employee intake process is being hindered by antiquated paper procedures and if your organisation’s new employees are sitting idle for too long when they start with you. If so, the next question should be if they could benefit from improved intake procedures that are far more efficient and less manual.

There are solutions that can easily automate this process

Automated account management tools ensure that a new employee has what she needs to be productive on day one. And, in most cases, the savings generated by the automatic systems offsets or reduces any costs associated with a paper-based system.

By doing away with the manual hand-to-hand paper systems, the user account management process and implementing web forms, a hiring manager or helpdesk employee can start the user account life cycle rather than waiting on paper approvals. Basic information, such as the name of new employee, department and title, is entered into the web form or filled out based on a scheduled extract from the HR system.

From there, an automated workflow process takes over and routes system access requests to the appropriate individuals. As approvals are granted, the system automatically creates the accounts in Active Directory, Exchange and numerous other systems based on the user’s role in the organisation.

What are the benefits of automated account management tools?

Instead of papers getting lost in the process or filed incorrectly, and new employees waiting for their access rights, these solutions automatically alert the correct “approver” who, with a simple action, can validate a request before sending it to the next “approver” or IT department. After approval, the software automatically creates the account and assures access to the applications the employee needs. This process ensures the new employee has what she needs on her first day of work.

How does a tool like this work?

Springs Global, the largest vertically integrated textile and home furnishings manufacturer in the world, implemented an automated user account management system to eliminate redundancies and create internal efficiencies. When its employee-intake process was manual, information only changed when someone noticed a discrepancy and modified a profile appropriately.

Now, Springs Global’s helpdesk uses digital forms, allowing the company to easily enter and make changes to information in Active Directory, such as name, location and manager for an employee. This allows the helpdesk to make minor changes without having elevated rights in the domain so that the systems remain secure.

Dean Wiech is the managing director of Tools4ever. Tools4ever supplies a variety of software products and integrated consultancy services involving identity management, such as user provisioning, RBAC, password management, SSO and access management.