Award-Winning Deployment Achieves 83% Faster Onboarding

Founded in 1933, Denmark-based manufacturing and engineering company Danfoss is one of the world’s top suppliers of manufacturing products delivering energy-efficient refrigeration, air conditioning and heating, variable-frequency drives, gas compressors, and mobile machinery.

As the 90-year-old Danish company readied for greater digitization and expansion to over 45,000 digital identities in more than 100 countries, it needed a more sophisticated solution to rapidly deploy efficient, reliable, and modern identity governance.

The Opportunity

On-Prem Platform “Holding Us Back”

Step one in this identity transformation was replacing its outdated Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution. Danfoss’ existing on-prem platform consisted of multiple servers in different environments that were time-consuming to manage and taxing to maintain. All aspects required customization, and processes that should have taken IAM teams a couple of months often dragged on for a year or more.

Users also had long-standing complaints about its confusing interface, which was hard to navigate and harder to use. The previous solution was on-premises and unavailable for employees outside the network.

Danfoss needed a more efficient, reliable IGA solution that could scale easily and reduce human error. It wanted to automate joiner, mover, and leaver (JML) scenarios to expedite onboarding, improve user access and certifications, and ensure privileged accounts weren’t running into Separation of Duty risks. Danfoss also needed to manage the lifecycle of its external workforce and third parties, meet compliance standards, and expand the quality of its IGA analytics and reporting.

To meet this high bar, Danfoss chose Saviynt Enterprise Identity Cloud.

The Solution

Global Scale, Tight Deadlines—and Fully Remote

Initiating in late 2020 at the height of the pandemic, Danfoss’ transition from legacy to cloud faced some daunting challenges. The implementation would span 100 countries and three continents, and all drafting, planning, and collaboration would have to be done 100% remotely in virtual workshops. It also had to be fast: an impending acquisition of another major industrial manufacturer would grow Danfoss by a third—and would put their new system to the test.

Danfoss, Saviynt, and partner Nixu chose a 'big bang' approach to implementation. Every employee in every region—as well as contractors, service and admin accounts—would be impacted at once.The collaboration not only achieved a 1:1 replacement of the old system but successfully delivered improved, simplified, and automated workflows across the globe—all before the company’s acquisition.

The groundbreaking deployment caught industry recognition, winning the Identity Fabrics & Enterprise IAM Project of the Year award in KuppingerCole’s European Identity and Cloud Conference.

The Results

After a Leap To Cloud: Warp-Speed Onboarding

With new, fully automated API integrations to Danfoss’ HR and ITSM systems, the company’s IAM teams were able to create a user account for a new hire in eight hours, and set up a shared mailbox in half the time. Managers can even initiate the request before the employee’s first day. Before Saviynt IGA, this manual process required chasing down a flat file from HR and could take as long as 48 hours per request.

As a manufacturing and engineering business, Danfoss also had to manage many constantly changing contractors and service accounts. Maintaining secure provisioning and de-provisioning of these accounts was crucial to mitigate risk. With Saviynt, access requests for contractors and contingent workers now go through four sets of eyes for approval. Each worker to electronically accept Danfoss terms of use before gaining access to a user account.

Gone are the days of chasing “orphaned” accounts with time-consuming, manual processes every quarter. Now, Danfoss can run scheduled reports every week. Rather than focusing all their time and energy on keeping their solution running, the IAM team is freed up to focus on value-adds like data-driven analytics and developing integrations for more applications.