EM Normandie onboards its students seamlessly.

EM Normandie is an international business school with 6,300 students spread across 6 campuses: Caen, Le Havre, Paris, Dubai, Dublin, and Oxford.

L'EM Normandie offers training in various fields such as entrepreneurship, logistics, supply chain, human resources management, international trade, marketing, finance, new technologies...

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EM Normandie in figures:

6300 students
1500 external speakers/professors
400 administrative staff
6 campuses

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Their need:

Automatically manage student accounts in an emergency context related to COVID. With no one on site, it was crucial to manage remote access and facilitate onboarding as well as access to video courses and materials.

But more generally, it was necessary to facilitate the onboarding of students, which was a major pain point in September.

“With COVID, we needed to put everything on the cloud a bit. A little quickly at the beginning, but since our campuses were physically closed, we needed it for all our employees and then to be able to integrate all the new users.
We couldn't intervene on-premise, so we needed SaaS.”

Clément Ganivet, front-end developer and level 2 support engineer at EM Normandie.

What was the problem at EM Normandie?

An automation system was in place, cobbled together with triggers, and it crashed at the slightest specific case. It wasn't a tool that could learn and integrate specificities, so its automation remained very archaic.

The initial setup was complex and very resource-intensive in terms of human resources.

When lockdown arrived, the widespread use of Zoom became very problematic because creating accounts for all students and providing access to their courses were absolute necessities. A high-performance automation solution had to be found quickly.

Furthermore, EM Normandie has three very different populations: students, instructors, and administrative staff, who do not have the same tools, profiles, or rights.

When the decision is made to change tools, two aspects are highlighted:

Centralizing accounts and users.
The automation of user account provisioning because manually processing 1500 incoming students is not feasible.

How was Youzer chosen as the IAM solution?

The IT team encountered several solutions that were cumbersome, requiring project management for at least 6 months and a difficult learning curve.

"We haven't seen an equivalent to Youzer; we've seen big companies with big solutions that weren't at all open to working with us on slightly more specific needs."

Clément Ganivet

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Youzer was in SaaS and met their needs, the solution was easy to pick up, several connectors already existed to connect to EM Normandie's applications, and above all, the implementation could be done immediately.

Youzer has the advantage of an intuitive interface. Compared to other, more cumbersome IAM solutions where key information is initially difficult to find, Youzer immediately provided the information we needed. It's so intuitive that we didn't have to spend time figuring out where to go to find what we needed.

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How was the onboarding with Youzer carried out?

The technical team anticipates a few days to launch the connection with Active Directory within Youzer. However, they are very surprised to complete this action in barely a day and see the information come back immediately.

Clément Ganivet, then a support engineer, and the IT team quickly launched the connection of their first applications, surprised by the speed of implementation.

For adding users, a test version is being implemented on administrative staff before switching to students.

After an ERP change, all applications are integrated into Youzer to provide a centralized view of accounts and users.

Implementation of an IAM in a very short time

What are the specificities of EM Normandie, but more generally of schools?

Onboarding occurs throughout the year, but schools experience a large influx in September, creating significant pressure. It is essential to fulfill all requests and, above all, ensure account availability for students from day one.

Since EM Normandie welcomes international students, specific characteristics must be taken into account, particularly regarding first names that may be absent or birth dates calculated or written differently from ours.

Youzer had to be adapted to these two specificities so that EM Normandie could automate their process.

Today, each particularity is analyzed and processed so that we no longer have to intervene manually.

"The apostrophes problem, we knew we were going to have it, but there was no solution to anticipate it for the following year and deal with it definitively."

"In this case, when we encounter a problem, we identify it, solve it and apply the changes in the workflow. Quite often with the help of support, but the problem no longer appears afterwards."

How Youzer simplified onboarding and offboarding within the business school?

Only a small number of people have access to Youzer.

Two people configure the connectors and workflows.
Level 1 support can, independently of level 2 support, modify certain accounts, correct typos, modify rights, or even suspend accounts.
Human Resources personnel manage arrivals, departures, and onboarding processes.

Extensive work has been carried out in collaboration between the IT and HR teams to finely configure onboarding and offboarding workflows.

Level 1 support teams have gained incredible autonomy, whereas previously, account-related issues required escalation to Level 2 support and the submission of a request via email. This inevitably lengthened communication and problem resolution times.

Workflows have been a major building block for EM Normandie. Account creation for students was the most time-consuming operation for the IT department, and it was on this population that the 1st workflows were created.

Creation of an onboarding workflow for a business school

Workflows allow students to be perfectly onboarded with controlled account creations, emails sent on time, and access transmission also sent automatically for their arrival.

"That's what's great [the workflows], we've actually saved a monster amount of time compared to what was done before! We no longer need to check all the account management."

Back to school used to rhyme with constant stress, availability of the entire support team, and a support desk overloaded with requests from students waiting for accounts.

Today, the situation is totally different; monitoring is ensured to visualize that all actions take place without friction, level 1 support resolves 90% of student requests, and the gain in time and peace of mind is invaluable.

We can go on vacation in September! We can breathe. We can focus our brains on other subjects.

Centralizing all account and user information provides an instant view of a situation upon request.

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What are your favorite features on Youzer?

Workflows!

Workflows have changed our lives; they are quite easy to get to grips with.

It was really cool because we really saved time, there is a real added value for everyone within EM Normandie, even for the end users.

And the customer support with the availability of Youzer's experts, even if it's not a feature, is highly appreciated within the business school.

"Your support is of very good quality, which means that as soon as we have a small problem, we're not stuck for a week. You're responsive and then efficient in the way you guide us."

Would you recommend Youzer?

"I would 100% recommend to anyone looking for an AMI.

This is powerful enough for an SME with 300 accounts to manage that may not necessarily need workflows while semi-automating processes. This would already alleviate many of the headaches related to centralization.

It is also useful for larger companies like us in terms of centralization and automation.

I would recommend Youzer 100%, regardless of the size of the company.

It is a tool that adapts very well to the needs of the client."