Why Automate User Provisioning?

Of the many processes in HR, user provisioning can be the most tedious. Creating profiles in multiple systems involves multiple people and departments, and there are many places where bottlenecks can form. HR and IT have to work together for the right things to happen at the right time, and the manual workload for IT is significant.

User provisioning automation takes a lot of the pain out of employee onboarding and offboarding. But what other ways could you use automated user provisioning? Onboarding and offboarding are at the top of the list and the most common, but there are other ways you can be streamlining processes when it comes to user provisioning.

1. New Employee Hired

The first step in automating this process is to create an onboarding checklist. Once you have all the elements gathered together, you can set up automation tasks in a workflow to handle

User creation
Adding to Active Directory, Exchange, or SharePoint (among other tools)
CRM, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other application setup

2. Employee Offboarding

The same types of processes apply when offboarding an employee, and a checklist of this process will help in starting to automate. You can use bots to

Move user information to an archive area
Remove access to applications
Disable the user profile

3. Change of role/permissions

When an employee is promoted or moved to a new functional area of the business, you’ll have some aspects of onboarding and offboarding to tackle. Automation can help you:

Remove and add access to appropriate applications
Receive and remove correct permissions to systems and applications
Be added to and removed from distribution lists

There are so many little steps in this process that automation and well-vetted processes will help to make the transition smoother.

4. User Auditing

One of the tasks that may get the backburner of your attention in HR is to perform user audits. Fortunately, bots can help with this as well. You can have robotic process automation bots

Look for disabled or expired users
Automate a report of invalid login attempts (almost all available in active directory) and have it emailed to you

5. Handle change requests

Employees aren’t static, are they? Once you get them all set up with onboarding, they’ll still have needs that bots can help you take care of, like:

Password resets
Information updates
Contact information changes
Payroll changes

Those hundreds of adjustments that need to be made each week to manage your organization’s workforce can be made much easier, eliminating errors, operational costs, and time previously spent handling manual tasks. Both your HR and IT teams will benefit when you start automating user provisioning.