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An aerospace company upgrades its customer identity and access management platform to deliver a more-elevated experience for its B2B customers.
THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY BEGAN WITH A WAIT. IT DIDN’T NEED TO.
The Situation
With products that are highly sought after by players across its industry, the large aerospace company had built its various portals for complex B2B interactions over mere window shopping. These platforms and apps were designed with security in mind, to protect the company’s extensive and diverse customer base, as well as the safety and integrity of their products. Customer identity and access management (CIAM) was always a priority.
Yet the aerospace company’s CIAM platform had become increasingly inefficient. Take the onboarding process, for example. A new customer would arrive to one of the company’s portals and submit an online form to request access to purchase equipment, request maintenance, receive manuals, or get customer support. It was a simple enough process from the outside, but it kicked off a complex chain of events on the back end.
That convoluted process included account creation, which had to be done manually; account approval (also manual); and an email informing the requestor that they’d gained access. This could take as much as 10–20 days. And, because customers were often navigating a siloed, decentralized B2B environment, steps often needed to be repeated when a customer sought access to a different company portal.
Business leaders recognized how a system and process upgrade could elevate the customer experience and deliver more seamless interactions with the company’s applications and services. But they also believed there was an opportunity to approach CIAM beyond traditional identity management. This felt like a major transformation. How could they execute it with minimal disruption?
THE SOLVE
They started by engaging Deloitte—which has deep experience helping companies leverage CIAM—to deliver a connected, human experience that enables trust for customers and consumers. To gain understanding into how the client and its B2B customers could work together more efficiently, Deloitte professionals set out to understand the needs—and pain points—of the humans on both sides of the aerospace company’s CIAM platform. This strategy phase led to a design that could enable the company to remove those cumbersome manual processes.
The legacy model may have been outmoded, but it used a custom database and a very complex data model. In designing a new model, it was crucial to maintain coexistence of data with the old system so that users and 100+ applications that were connected to the legacy CIAM platform would experience minimal impact. A modern CIAM solution was designed and implemented with new workflows for dramatic change, as it was important to gain efficiencies and reduce the existing 10-day window for customer access. Deloitte helped the aerospace company automate processes so that approval and provisioning for access to one product would also mean approval for associated parts and manuals—eliminating steps that didn’t add value and enabling access for customers within a matter of hours.
Deloitte professionals worked closely with the aerospace company’s central CIAM owners, creating standard operating procedures and designing a roadmap to help guide stakeholders through the conversion. Successful implementation hinged on the data sync between the new solution and legacy databases, which were still connected to 100+ downstream systems. The Deloitte team demonstrated its agility during the testing phase by making adjustments to data models and using scripts to automate data migration. With extensive CIAM experience, automation, and an offshore contingent for non-sensitive data in compliance with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the Deloitte team enabled delivery in a fast, cost-effective way while limiting disruption.
EASIER ACCESS FOR THE CUSTOMERS. SIMPLER PROCESSES FOR COMPANIES.
The Impact
A transformation can seem daunting—so much so that a company may hesitate to start—especially if they’re using a legacy custom identity system built on an older infrastructure with complex implementations and application dependencies. With Deloitte’s help, the aerospace company has modernized its CIAM approach to enable a better, more efficient experience for its customers while also benefiting stakeholders within the organization.
External end users and customers have gained:
- A modern, intuitive user experience.
- Self-service capability to create and update accounts systematically.
- Quicker access to resources and technical manuals they need, as approvals can now be completed in hours.
Meanwhile, internal users can:
- React to timely, automated notifications of approval requests.
- Feel more confident that customer requests are addressed as they’re submitted.
- Complete approvals in bulk.
- Access the platform using enterprise credentials through single sign-on between the new system and enterprise identity management.
Added benefits for the organization include reduced dependency on legacy infrastructure, lower maintenance efforts for the legacy platform, and decreased support costs because of automated processes. And by increasing ease of access to its platforms, without altering the app-end experience customers had previously waited 10–20 days for, the aerospace company affirms the importance of a frictionless customer experience, even in B2B.
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Anish Srivastava
