Providence Hospital saves additional staff
| Executive Summary | |
|---|---|
| Problem | The need to standardize setup of user accounts and reduce the amount of time network engineers spent assigning rights in Active Directory. Additionally, the organisation wanted a way to assign Administrative rights in Active directory for different levels of staff. |
| Solution | A permanent process for user account life cycle management. |
| Products | UMRA | Result | First - Dramatic reduction in the number of calls to the helpdesk. Second - Cut admin time for new users by 80% and cut technical time for user updates by 50%. Third - Improved accuracy when creating user rights. |
Providence Hospital, located in downtown Columbia, SC is a 247- bed hospital founded in 1938 by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Augustine to minister to the community, in both body and spirit. The facility is best known for the expertise in cardiac care it provides through Providence Heart & Vascular Institute. With a busy hospital staff of over 2,000 nurses, doctors, and hospital administrators, Providence Hospital needed to standardize setup of user accounts and reduce the amount of time network engineers spent assigning rights in Active Directory. Tony McNeil, Technical Manager stated, “We have more demands on our department and we are not getting any additional staff due to the economic situation. Therefore we have to work smarter and we need tools that help us work more effi ciently.” This was the perfect opportunity to put into action a permanent process for user account life cycle management utilizing Tools4ever’s complete User Management Resource Administrator solution.
Immediate delivery
Providence Hospital decided to implement UMRA to mainstream the provisioning process from the time an employee is hired and entered into the hospital developed, web based security application to the time they are entered into Active Directory. The previous process took nearly 2 days to complete before a user was ultimately provisioned in all systems. Now the process allows for an almost immediate delivery of the account information to the manager. A web form allows for the assignment of group privileges and permissions to individual users. The application also creates the appropriate Exchange mailbox and creates a home folder for the employee on the appropriate share drive.
Providence Hospital decided to implement UMRA to mainstream the provisioning process from the time an employee is hired and entered into the hospital developed, web based security application to the time they are entered into Active Directory. The previous process took nearly 2 days to complete before a user was ultimately provisioned in all systems. Now the process allows for an almost immediate delivery of the account information to the manager. A web form allows for the assignment of group privileges and permissions to individual users. The application also creates the appropriate Exchange mailbox and creates a home folder for the employee on the appropriate share drive. “There were different reasons to choose Tools4ever as our preferred provider which, among others, is the ability to customize the solution and of course the price. In addition, the company is very customer oriented and provide a high degree of technical skills”, says Tony McNeil.
Immediate Savings
The immediate results of implementing UMRA have been time and money savings for the IT department. John Postiglione, system administrator, says, ”UMRA has saved us time and money. We have probably cut our admin time for new users by 80%. And the work is done by non-admins. Additional technical time for user updates has been reduced by 50%. UMRA has allowed us to spread the workload of network administration out to other employees in Information Systems to perform basic user administration tasks, so network administrators have more time to work on other projects.
Defined process
In addition to time and money savings, Providence Hospital now has a defi ned process for User Account Management that can be viewed and audited at any time. The software also accommodates one-off requests with ease.
Optimize process
In addition to the automated processes, Providence is currently in the process of adding multiple forms to allow helpdesk personnel to securely make changes to specifi c groups without the need to assign helpdesk employees network administrative privileges. The hospital will continue to automate their Administrative tasks and Providence Hospital continues to engage Tools4ever consultants to refi ne, improve and make additions to their processes.