News
Coop Norge modernizes employee access rights management together with Nixu
October 2022 by Patrick LEBRETON
Coop Norge, Norway’s second-largest retailer, has transitioned its employee identity lifecycle management to the cloud in partnership with cybersecurity services company Nixu. The new solution automates processes, improves governance and security, and combines user governance of up to eight separate systems into one. Having the first Norwegian clients, Nixu continues to grow its business in Norway.
Coop Norge has 28,000 employees and 1,400 external workers. The cooperative is owned by almost 2 million co-owners, and it manages more than 1,200 stores under six different grocery store brands and two home DIY store brands: Obs, Extra, Coop Mega, Coop Prix, Coop Marked, Matkroken, Obs BYGG, and Coop Byggmix.
Coop Norge wanted to replace its existing, outdated solution with Saviynt’s cloud-based Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution within a six-month period. IGA solutions help organizations manage the identity lifecycle of their workforce, i.e., to keep track of employees when they join or exit a company or transfer within it.
The goal of the entire modernization project was to take Coop’s internal and external identities to the cloud while keeping the business secure, controlling operational costs, and improving the user experience.
To implement the new solution, Coop Norge partnered up with Nixu thanks to Nixu’s wide experience with similar Saviynt IGA implementations and its Nordic presence. In the first phase of the partnership, which started in January 2022, Nixu has implemented the essential Saviynt functionalities needed in employee identity lifecycle management and made the most integral integrations.
“This is only the basis, and we will be doing collaboration for years to come. We need the resources and expertise from Nixu to achieve what we want. In the future, when we start bigger projects, we will call upon Nixu to assist. At least, SAP integration is something I see on the horizon,” says Coop Norge’s Enterprise Architect Eirik Klouman Berg.
“The project ran very smoothly since Coop Norge had a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve. It has been a pleasure to work with such a capable client organization, which also played its part in us being able to carry out the project on schedule and within budget,” says Miska Laakkonen, Head of Business for IGA and PAM at Nixu.
The new IGA system enables better governance thanks to automated processes and the ability to grant access rights accurately. The system owners and line managers will get better visibility over their employees’ access rights when soon one Saviynt system can perform the same operations as earlier eight systems were performing separately from each other. At a later phase, some additional functionalities will be integrated into Saviynt. The next steps in the partnership will also include connecting Coop’s new learning management solution to Saviynt.
