Advanced Drainage Systems Looks to the Cloud for Modern IGA

The Opportunity

An industry leader in sustainable water management, Advanced Drainage Systems (ADS) designs and manufactures pipes, septic and wastewater management systems, and an array of fittings, filters, basins, chambers, and other comprehensive drainage solutions. The company’s longstanding commitment to sustainability is reflected in the fact that it is among the largest plastic recyclers in North America, reusing more than 500 million pounds of plastic in its products each year to create a circular economy and reduce the carbon footprint of water infrastructure.

Publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2014, ADS employs more than 5,000 people in approximately 70 manufacturing facilities and 40 distribution centers across the U.S. and Canada. With urban population growth — not to mention the ever-increasing frequency of large-scale stormwater-related natural disasters — there’s growing demand for the company’s products around the globe. This market expansion can only be expected to continue, since having proper infrastructure in place to capture, convey, store, and treat wastewater will become even more important for the future resilience of communities.

To advance along its strategic IT security roadmap, ADS needed to consolidate its identity and access management processes onto a single platform, one that could support both its on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and its growing cloud footprint. The manual processes that ADS had been relying on for access provisioning and approvals were slow, error-prone, and resource-intensive. Strictly adhering to segregation of duties (SoD) governance is essential for compliance, but with ADS’s existing systems it was complex and difficult, which was burdensome for internal teams and auditors alike.

Shortly after going public, ADS reached out to KPMG for help building a strategic identity and access management (IAM) roadmap. The goal was to streamline compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and prepare the organization for future growth by improving efficiency, automation, security, and control. Stakeholders at ADS wanted to reduce costs and the amount of time internal support teams were spending on access provisioning so that they could instead focus on higher-value tasks.

ADS was expanding its cloud footprint, so a cloud-native solution like Saviynt was a fit for the company’s increasing reliance on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. At the same time, Saviynt’s flexibility enabled it to seamlessly integrate with the on-premises Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), ADS’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. While legacy identity solutions could integrate with Oracle EBS and other cloud-based solutions worked well with SaaS, Saviynt stood out because it was able to do both, with tailored capabilities that could be extended across ADS’s manufacturing facilities.

The Solution

Despite the disruption caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic midway through the project, ADS’s implementation of Saviynt Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) and Application Access Governance (AAG) was completed on time. The strength of ADS’s relationship with KPMG — as well as Saviynt’s best-fit capabilities — made this smooth rollout possible.

In addition to Oracle EBS, core business systems that ADS integrated with Saviynt include Microsoft Active Directory (AD), Office 365, and Outlook, as well as Salesforce, Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) and Oracle Financial Close and Consolidation (FCC). ADS has been able to automate access provisioning across these systems, making it so that new hires have access to all the tools they need within their first 24 hours on the job. Previously it could take as long as two weeks before they were fully ready to be productive. Streamlined processes are easier for ADS’s internal engineering team to manage, and selfservice provisioning is simple enough that everyone — from plant workers to sales teams and executives — is able to use the new solution. All of these stakeholders benefit from more robust security, too.

Audit trails are simpler and clearer as well. With a single source of truth for identity across enterprise systems, it’s possible to see at a glance which individuals have access to which software. This process efficiency translates into accelerated audits, faster compliance checks, and streamlined review cycles. Saviynt automatically tracks SoD conflicts, too, notifying compliance teams to implement mitigating controls or remove access.

THE RESULTS

With Saviynt, ADS has been able to accelerate the joiner-mover-leaver process for all employees. The company has also been able to implement just-in-time provisioning, since Saviynt’s Identity Cloud is able to grant access in real time, right when the user needs it — not beforehand. Robust controls and extensive visibility allow compliance and risk management teams to confirm that appropriate governance is in place.

ADS plans to continue its cloud adoption journey over the next couple of years, and the company will consider moving its ERP to the cloud.

“We know we’ll have to make significant changes,” says Beau Bollinger, Director of IT Security and Compliance at ADS. “Knowing that Saviynt will be able to adapt to those changes along with us and will be able to continue to provide value — that gives me confidence.”