Business opportunity

With approximately 1,000 employees joining and leaving one leading, global medical technology company monthly through contract work, it’s vital that their off-boarding and on-boarding is processed securely and efficiently, enabling productivity for new employees. Ensuring offboarded employees can no longer access confidential systems is essential for compliance. The frequent staff turnover resulted in vulnerabilities, delays and errors in the process.

To offboard an employee, their manager would raise a request in the HR system, generating a request to the back-office team to revoke access to 23 applications. As part of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance, the team aimed to complete offboarding within 48 hours—a challenging target given the complex, non-standardized environment.

Technical challenge

Every month, around 1,000 offboarding requests would be processed by four different technical teams, each responsible for a subset of applications across four technology platforms.

Most of these applications have their own user database, and there was no unique user ID spanning all systems. The technical teams would manually search for users based on a variety of attributes, attempting to make positive matches with information from Active Directory.

This complex, high-touch process typically took two days from start to finish and around 90 minutes of work per request. Additionally, staff spent time maintaining detailed activity logs for compliance and audit.

 

Our solution

The Kyndryl Workflow Orchestration and Kyndryl Consult teams evaluated the company’s technology landscape and working practices. Kyndryl designed a comprehensive workflow orchestration solution to automate and streamline offboarding across all 23 applications.

The Microsoft Power Platform—a low-code solution for building enterprise-grade applications—was the key enabler for the offboarding solution. Offboarding requests are now automated with zero-human touch, eliminating human error with a 100% success rate. What’s more, the redesigned process from Kyndryl aligns fully with the medical technology company’s security and compliance posture and is flexible enough for expansion into other domains.

 

What progress looks like

Kyndryl’s fully automated solution empowers this medical technology company to offboard employees faster with a better user experience (UX) and at lower cost.

• 100% automation of processes and worklogs
• 94% reduction in mean time to resolve: 45 hours of productivity gained per onboarded employee
• 88% reduction in average processing time: From 90 to 10 minutes per request
• 575,000+ hours saved annually
• 12,000 employees offboarded annually, for a total of 300,000 events
• 10 FTEs reallocated to higher value activities
• $300,000+ in annual savings in offboarding costs alone
• Enhanced compliance and audit posture
• Reduced complexity, delay and error