How did Skill&You save time and improve the reliability of its audits?

Skill&You is a distance learning and training organization present in several European countries.

• 120,000 students by 2021
• 14 schools
• 1300 employees
• numerous application tools developed in-house

Their needs :

• Centralize account creation requests
• Comply with the prerogatives of the statutory auditors when auditing the management of authorizations and identities

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"There's been a pretty strong direct adoption of Youzer, they [employees within the IT department] are very happy with Youzer. It's become part of the internal vernacular of HR and others 'have you done a Youzer?"

Dimitri Chevtchenko - CIO

What were Skill&You's challenges?

In the early days, Skill&You had a more modest internal organization, where it was easy to ask the IT teams to create accounts for newcomers. Then the company grew very quickly, and the number of employees increased dramatically.

The initial proximity between the HR and IT teams has remained, but we have had to manage the growing flow of requests for access to the various applications.

These requests to set up accounts for new employees were transmitted via various channels (e-mail, telephone, tickets...) and were arriving in ever-increasing numbers, having to be handled with ever-greater care: indeed, the statutory auditors were requesting annual audits and carrying out regular checks, which left no room for inaccuracies.

To obtain traceability of an account creation request, it was necessary to retrieve the history of emails, tickets, etc. Account creation request templates had been set up (using forms included in the emails), but this was not enough to have a real tool for managing authorizations. Skill&You needed a tool to centralize requests and provide real traceability of authorizations.

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👉 "Getting out of the somewhat artisanal side and the regulatory obligation of the statutory auditors forced us to have a tool."

How did you go about finding an authorization management solution?

Dimitri Chevtchenko (CIO at Skill&You) was familiar with the IAM (Identity and Access Management) tools used by major groups, which were industrial solutions but not adapted to their needs. These solutions are often extremely cumbersome to set up and use. He wasn't aware of any tools adapted to the size of his company.

For him, IAM covers both infrastructure and servers, and he was looking for a solution to manage identities, account lifecycles and users.

"When I discovered Youzer, I found a solution tailored to our needs that met my expectations. We develop software in-house. We can be seen as a Software As A Service publisher, since we develop a Learning Management System for 120,000 learners.
We're kind of in this business of creating software, solutions, so Youzer spoke to me.
There was also the French solution aspect and the responsiveness part that hit the nail on the head."

What attracted Skill&You to the Youzer application?

"Youzer has idea boxes and we feel that they really listen to customer requests. Youzer really listens to what we submit to them to build the road map."

Dimitri Chevtchenko

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Some publishers may claim that they are close to customers and build their applications according to requests, but this is not always true. Skill&You really feels it's a healthy approach to co-developing the product based on user needs.

"It's really nice to say to yourself, I need a connector quickly: you go to the catalog, configure the connector and you've got it, it's simple."

Youzer was quickly adopted by the Skill&You teams. Initially, the IT team set up the connectors and saw how to create the packages needed to automate account creation, but it's a solution that didn't take them very long.

Compared with major solutions on the market, which are aimed at large accounts, where a server might have had to be installed, with Youzer the IT team is quickly up and running.

Dimitri also really appreciates the space shared with other customers to submit new ideas for the application, as this creates a community aspect.

Youzer has set up a collaborative space where anyone can propose changes to the application and vote for the ideas of others. These votes enable Youzer's technical team to prioritize developments for the application. This helps us to meet our customers' needs as closely as possible.

"We see how people vote, we wouldn't necessarily have had the ideas and I think that's great."
"It's really a solution that gets to the heart of the matter."

Dimitri Chevtchenko

How did Youzer help the Skill&You teams?

Account creation was already well mastered, but Youzer has industrialized the process and made it easier for the IT department.

Skill&You's primary objective: to greatly improve the regulatory aspect and traceability of authorizations.

They went from a system where they had to take screenshots, time-stamp, explain the origin of requests... to Youzer.

The statutory auditors give a mark, and on an important indicator. At Skill&You, this mark was positive, as they had equipped themselves with Youzer, which enabled them to centralize, automate and trace authorization requests.

"We told the auditors that we had switched to Youzer, and they saw that it was a specialist company."

By equipping itself with Youzer, a tool that enables IT teams to carry out checks, Skill&You was able to provide reports, present them and their rating went green.

"Without Youzer, I would have had to hire a technician to do all the tracing of the provisionnings."

A great deal of time has been saved, and even on a day-to-day basis, the infrastructure manager spends less time centralizing or reconstituting information.

What's next for Youzer?

The IT team would like to go further now, having industrialized the account creation process, they would now like to implement account deletion. There's still a lot of manual work to be done.

The team uses account creation forms a lot, but has now changed HRIS and wants to integrate it with Youzer to automate it and make life easier for HR and technicians.

Then, the IT team will integrate its telephony into Youzer, as it has just been upgraded.

The aim is to centralize all tools.

Skill&You's favourite features :

• User and account lifecycle management
• Overview of inputs and outputs
• The forms
• Packages
• CSV extractions

Would you recommend Youzer?

"When I have a product that's easily adopted, there are no irritants, everyone's happy and it doesn't become an issue, that's great.

We tell Youzer what we need and they take it into account. Youzer is a human-sized company that responds quickly, and I get the feeling that the Youzer team is passionate about the tool it develops. They want to make it evolve.

I talk to other start-ups where things are evolving, but not very much. Here, you get the feeling that they're really listening to the need for functionalities and that they're interested.

What we feed back to them helps build the roadmap. There are ideas they wouldn't have thought of that are brought in by customers and implemented."

Good feeling, it works well, it's square. For me, it's perfect when it goes like that."