Optimizing User Access: 83% Efficiency Gains by Leading US Oil and Gas Major

About the Client

The client is an American multinational energy corporation predominantly specializing in oil and gas that combines upstream, midstream, downstream together. Within oil and gas, the client is vertically integrated and is involved in hydrocarbon exploration, production, refining, marketing and transport, chemicals manufacturing and sales, and power generation

Challenges

• The existing review processes, being business critical, were siloed, and modernizing the features appeared complex.
• Identified the lack of key user groups in the journey: control performer, supervisor, and information steward.
• The existing manual approach was quite tedious, leading to efficiency and productivity loss.
• The current solution was not scalable to multiple platforms and was prone to data loss, which resulted in increased manual work and documentation using MS Excel and SharePoint.
• Lack of mobile compatibility led to poor user experiences.

The client wanted to move away from the manual, error-prone methods and automate these processes to enhance efficiency, availability, and scalability.

Customer Pain Points

• Supports limited users
• ·Manual email reminders
• Prone to data loss
• No mobile compatibility
• Low productivity and efficiency
• No data integrity
• Poor experience

SharePoint

The existing manual user review process, primarily handled through Sharepoing and Excel spreadsheets

• Control performers add user details in SharePoint Views/Sets
• The SharePoint link is shared to approvers via email
• Reminders are sent when status is still "Pending" (default)
• After UAR completion, notifications are sent if applicable

MS Excel

• Control performers add user details in Excel Sheet from the raw file
• The Excel link is shared to approvers via email
• Reminders are sent when status is still blank/pending
• After UAR completion, notifications are sent if applicable

Solution Highlights

• Engaged as a consulting and engineering partner with the client.
• Introduced a digitalized User Access Review solution for regular and privileged users.

Solution development steps:

• Conducted a discovery workshop to identify user journeys and pain points of key stakeholders.
• Created and hosted multiple Azure functions to improve backend efficiency and performance, including:
  ▪ Process schedule function
  ▪ Email functions for supervisors and InfoStewards
  ▪ Update user type function
  ▪ Retry failed emails function
  ▪ Weekly reminder emails function
  ▪ Schedule reports

Modernized the platform with:

• Async workflow management
• Search filters with collapsed view
• Overlay pop-ups for specific actions
• Automation of complex tasks

Positive outcomes:

• Received positive feedback from users and the product owner.
• Achieved a review completion rate of 98.74% (previously rate was 96%).
• Improved completion rate reduced access-related issues and work disruptions for users.
• Solution can be used as a plug and play across industries where IT/Audit application compliance requires access reviews to be tracked and monitored.

Business Benefits

• Review completion rate of 99%
  (increase of 3%)
• Efforts savings of 83% for each review/response action
• 6 minutes processing time for ~25K records
• Enhanced user experience and mobile-enabled – moving from manual to digital process
• Seamless audit compliance – 0 data loss, 0 integrity issues