Chantelle

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Identity management is still a major IT challenge for many medium and large businesses today. Put simply, the technology manages individual access to applications and data, while ensuring a consistent record of employee identities and their network transactions. But the problem for many businesses is that they lack a single, consistent approach to identity management. This was the issue facing Chantelle, the oldest and largest lingerie designer and manufacturer in France. The company has achieved worldwide success with more than 80% of sales outside of France and annual turnover (2008) of €350 million. But such rapid expansion brings its own difficulties. The company has grown to 6,000 individuals, of which 1,750 access a subset of the company’s 90 applications on a regular basis. Until recently the use of multiple systems led to inconsistencies and even errors although the 50 strong IT team did its best to keep up with staff turnover.

Fabrice Chevron, methods and client service manager at Chantelle, says: “Fast growth, combined with an increasingly complex enterprise computing environment meant that managers had to send new employee details at least two weeks in advance to ensure that new hires could access the required systems and applications on their start date.

Chevron says: “Apart from the time spent waiting for employees to become fully productive, this also had an impact on morale. People sometimes felt that the company wasn’t working hard enough to get their teams up and running.” This was far from the truth with the IT team working round the clock to keep up with new starters and leavers. “But it was clear that we had to do something to alleviate the situation,” he says.

In the middle of 2007, Chevron and his team invited a number of systems integrators to propose a solution to Chantelle. “We had several clear objectives,” he says. “Firstly we wanted a single, consistent view of every employee who used our company systems. In addition we wanted to reduce the time taken to provision new users. We also wanted employees to be able to change their own passwords so that we could reduce the pressure on our information systems team.”

After publishing a request for information, Chantelle short-listed solutions from suppliers including Sun, IBM and Oracle. Detailed demonstrations and proofs of concept convinced Chantelle to select Sun Identity Manager 7.0.1 Chevron says: “Even though we have never deployed Sun technology before, we were impressed by the maturity and simplicity of its solution compared with the software proposed by other systems integrators.”

During the next 12 months, Chantelle IT team worked with systems integrator BT to install Sun Identity Manager at the heart of company’s information systems where it manages employee access to existing systems and applications including IBM AS400, IBM Cognos, IBM Domino, and its Microsoft Windows environment. It is also integrated with the company’s OpenLDAP server which manages access to Chantelle’s intranet based on Vdoc Portal technology.

Now, when a manager or employee sends a request to the IT team, Sun Identity Manager automatically forwards a request to the system administrator via email. If the request is approved, the solution creates an account for the specified applications and sends account information to the end user.

The solution went into production in May 2008 and has delivered several significant benefits to the IT team and the company as a whole. The time required to provision a user on the network has been cut from two weeks to just two days. The Chantelle IT team has also developed a workflow that reduces the risk of mistakes during this process. “We now have a single version of the truth and can manage end users far more quickly. By eliminating inconsistencies and errors the number of employee calls to the help desk has fallen dramatically,” says Chevron.

Now that Sun Identity Manager has overcome most of the challenges concerning employee provisioning and deprovisioning, Chevron is looking at other ways that the technology could benefit the Chantelle business. For example, the software has the potential to simplify compliance by delivering reports for legislation, as well as offering the ability to build custom reports. It will also simplify the deployment of new enterprise-wide solutions, including SAP business software, which Chantelle expects to deploy in near future.

Chevron says, “This was a challenging but rewarding project. We had to do a lot of work on our side to clean up existing employee information before we could deploy the Sun technology, but once we’d taken that step, the impact on the our IT team and employees at large was enormous. Sun Identity Manager now gives us even greater confidence that our staff numbers, along with our information systems, can scale and adapt to meet this growth.”