EM Normandie is an international business school with 6,300 students on 6 campuses: Caen, Le Havre, Paris, Dubai, Dublin and Oxford.
EM Normandie offers courses in a variety of fields, including entrepreneurship, logistics, supply chain, human resources management, international trade, marketing, finance, new technologies, etc.
EM Normandie in figures :
- 6,300 students
- 1,500 guest speakers/teachers
- 400 administrative staff
- 6 campuses
Their needs:
Automatically manage student accounts in a COVID emergency. 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, we had to facilitate student onboarding, which had been a major problem in September.
"With covid, we needed to put a bit of everything on the cloud. A bit in a hurry at first, but as 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 EM Normandie's problem?
An automation system was in place, cobbled together with triggers, which crashed at the slightest specificity. It wasn't a tool that could learn and integrate specificities, so its automation remained very archaic.
It was complex to get to grips with, and very energy-intensive in terms of human resources.
With the advent of confinement, the widespread use of Zoom became a major problem, as the creation of accounts for all students and access to their courses was an absolute necessity. A high-performance automation solution had to be found quickly.
What's more, EM Normandie has three very different populations: students, lecturers and administrative staff, who don't have the same tools, the same profiles or the same rights.
When the decision is made to change tools, two aspects are highlighted:
- centralization of accounts and users
- automation of user account provisioning, because 1,500 new students can't be processed manually
How did you come to choose Youzer as your IAM solution?
The IT team came across several solutions that were cumbersome, required at least 6 months of project management and were difficult to get to grips with.
"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
Youzer was SaaS-based and met their needs, the solution was easy to use, several connectors already existed to connect to EM Normandie's applications, and above all, it could be set up immediately.
Youzer has the advantage of an intuitive interface. Compared with other IAMs, which are a lot messier, and where it's a bit hard to get the key info at first, when we were introduced to Youzer, we immediately found the right info. It's so intuitive that we didn't even have to think about going there to see it.
How did you get started with Youzer?
The technical team allows a few days for Youzer to connect to Active Directory. However, they are very surprised to be able to do this in just one day, and to see the information come back immediately.
Clément Ganivet, a support engineer at the time, and the IT team quickly connected their first applications, surprised by the speed with which they were up and running.
For the addition of users, a test version has been launched for administrative staff before switching over to students.
After an ERP changeover, all applications are integrated into Youzer for a centralized view of accounts and users.
What are the special features of EM Normandie, but more generally of other schools?
The arrival in companies is spread throughout the year, in the case of schools, there is a big influx of arrivals in September and the pressure is high. You have to meet all the demands and above all ensure that accounts are available to students from day 1ᵉʳ.
As EM Normandie welcomes foreign students, some specificities have to be taken into account, notably in the first name sometimes missing or the date of birth calculated or written differently from ours.
We had to adapt Youzer to these two specificities so that EM Normandie could automate their process.
Today, every detail is analysed and processed, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
"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 did Youzer simplify arrivals and departures at the business school?
A small number of people have access to Youzer.
- Two people configure 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 people manage arrivals and departures, and the arrival process.
A great deal of work was carried out in collaboration between the IT and HR teams to fine-tune the onboarding and offboarding workflows.
The level 1 support teams have gained incredible autonomy, whereas before, for accounts, you had to go through the level 2 support team and send an e-mail. This inevitably lengthened communication and problem-solving times.
Workflows were a major building block for EM Normandie. Creating student accounts was the most time-consuming operation for the IT department, so it was on this population that the 1ᵉʳˢ workflows were created.
Workflows ensure that students are perfectly onboarded, with account creation under control, emails sent in good time and access transmission 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."
The start of the new school year was synonymous with constant stress, availability of the entire support team and a support system overloaded with requests from students awaiting accounts.
Today, the situation is totally different, with monitoring to ensure that all actions are carried out without friction, level 1 support to resolve 90% of students' queries, and inestimable gains in time and peace of mind.
We'll be able to go on vacation in September! We can breathe. You can focus your brain on other things.
The centralization of all account and user information provides an instant overview of the situation when a request is made.
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What are your favorite Youzer features?
Workflows!
Workflows have changed our lives, and they're pretty easy to get to grips with.
It's been really cool because we've really saved time, and there's real added value for everyone at EM Normandie, even the end users.
And Youzer's customer support and expert availability, while not a feature, is highly appreciated by 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.
That's quite a lot for an SME with 300 accounts to manage, who wouldn't necessarily need workflows while semi-automating processes. It would already take a lot of the headache out of centralization.
It's also useful for larger companies like us in terms of centralization and automation.
I would 100% recommend Youzer, whatever the size of your company.
It's a tool that adapts superbly to customer needs."
Clément Ganivet, front-end developer and level 2 support engineer at EM Normandie.
