With over 60 years of experience, Baker Tilly is an accounting and consulting group with 60 offices in France. The firm currently serves nearly 40,000 clients and employs 2,300 people throughout the country.
The organization is structured around five main areas of expertise:
- accounting and consulting,
- HR & social,
- legal,
- audit,
- advisory.
The IT team is facing strong growth momentum. In just a few years, the workforce has almost doubled, leading to a significant increase in staff turnover: arrivals, departures, internal mobility, changes in status or scope.
In this context, identity and access management has become a key issue, both for security and for operational fluidity between IT and HR teams.
What was the situation before Youzer?
Before the project, Baker Tilly used an on-premise IAM solution that had been in place for several years. This tool had automated some of the processes related to identity and access management. However, with the growth of the group and the increase in the number of employees, certain functions were showing their limitations in terms of flexibility and scalability.
Functional changes had to be framed within dedicated projects, which slowed down adjustments that were not as rapid in response to operational needs. Furthermore, the solution was not directly connected to the HRIS, requiring additional actions on the HR side when employees joined or left the company. Finally, maintaining the on-premise platform—operation, updates, supervision—mobilized the infrastructure teams, at a time when the IT department wanted to gradually reduce this operational burden.
“We needed something that was more flexible, more adaptable, and more suited to our needs so that we could respond to requirements without having to go through the process of specific development every time.”
Anthony Gachet, IT Manager
How was the reflection process conducted and what criteria were used?
The IT department relaunched its monitoring of the IAM market, taking a pragmatic approach. The goal was not to deploy an oversized platform, but to find a solution suited to a medium-sized company, capable of covering actual uses without excessive complexity.
Several criteria guided the selection:
- The ability to reproduce what already exists, at a minimum, from the POC phase onwards
- Native compatibility with HRIS, validated before signing any agreement
- A SaaS model to eliminate operational constraints
- A modular and scalable approach, without systematic dependence on specific development
- A budgetary framework consistent with the intended uses
“We were looking for a tool that was easy to understand, that we could implement without an intermediary, and above all, that was suited to a mid-sized company like ours. Investing in a very expensive solution and only using half of its capabilities didn't make sense to us.”
Anthony Gachet, IT Manager
The POC played a central role in the decision, allowing for concrete testing of integrations, workflows, and the tool's ability to adapt to existing internal rules.
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How did the implementation go?
The implementation was based on groundwork carried out mainly by the infrastructure lead in Baker Tilly's IT teams, who were heavily involved throughout the project. All existing business scenarios had to be reviewed:
- arrival of an employee,
- departure,
- job change,
- change of civil status,
- contract changes.
Each scenario was written step by step to ensure that the sequence of actions corresponds precisely to internal practices.
The workflows were then rebuilt in the tool, tested individually, and then validated across the entire chain, from the HRIS to the directories and target applications.
Particular attention was paid to migrating existing data in order to integrate existing users without disrupting accounts or access. This phase ensured a gradual and secure transition to the new tool, without any operational disruption.
The project thus heavily mobilized the IT teams, in line with the IT department's stated goal of creating a structuring project, which was a necessary condition for the reliability and sustainability of the processes put in place.
“An IAM project like this is really an IT department project. You need infrastructure or dev/data teams that have control over Active Directory, Entra ID, and APIs.”
Anthony Gachet, IT Manager
What benefits were observed after deployment?
The first benefit is organizational. Eliminating duplicate HR data entry has made data more reliable from the outset and reduced human error, while also saving a significant amount of time.
The IT department now has a system capable of absorbing the total volume of transactions for 2,300 users, with industrialized processes (including for the management of external service providers).
In terms of security, departures are better controlled, rights are assigned consistently, and traceability is enhanced. Teams can compare data from the HRIS with actual account statements and quickly identify the source of any discrepancies.
Finally, the ability to evolve workflows and notifications without relying on external developments provides welcome operational flexibility for both the IT department and support services.
“Today, we can evolve our workflows and notifications without having to go through specific development.”
Etienne Harmange, Lead Infrastructure
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Which features are used on a daily basis?
Its use is primarily based on a three-part structure:
- Workflows, at the heart of action orchestration
- Mapping tables, serving as a reference between HR data and IT rules
- Conditional matrices, enabling detailed assignment of groups and rights
“It is really the combination of workflows, correspondence tables, and matrices that allows us to be so precise in our rules.”
Etienne Harmange, Lead Infrastructure
What is the vision for the future?
The IT team plans to go further, particularly in terms of external management (with the aim of displaying controlled entry forms) and notifications to alert managers when employees leave (equipment, information transfer).
Consideration is also being given to reporting discrepancies between theoretical rights and actual rights, not with a view to automatic correction, but for the sake of visibility and auditability.
The ambition remains the same: to make identity management a reliable, scalable foundation that is aligned with the group's operational realities.
Would you recommend Youzer?
For Baker Tilly's IT team, recommending the solution was a natural step as usage became established and teams regained control over their processes.
“Yes, we would recommend Youzer, we already have. Today, we are more of a prescriber of the solution. What we really like is finally being able to take control and quickly evolve processes. Modifying an email template or adding information to a notification used to require specific development work and a ticket with the publisher. Today, I can recreate notification workflows myself as needed, for example when HR asks us for new information."
Etienne HARMANGE, Infrastructure Lead
This autonomy also contributes to better adoption of the tool by business teams.
“There is a real benefit for everyone (both IT and HR), and it is greatly appreciated. Compared to what we had before, it is more agile and more SaaS-based. Employee onboarding is changing significantly in companies, so we need to be able to adapt without having a tool that is complicated or difficult to use, and without having to go back to the publisher for development.”
Anthony Gachet, IT Manager
