Consort Medical Enables Seamless SaaS Application Rollout with OneLogin Single Sign-on Services

Consort Medical Group is a leading global contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO), providing advanced delivery technologies, formulation and manufacturing solutions for pharmaceuticals. Its customers include some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Consort is at the leading edge of innovation and is committed to investing in patient- and customer-driven innovation, with the potential to create new treatments, new markets and new opportunities. Employing more than 2,200 people, across 11 locations throughout Europe, the business comprises two integrated operating divisions: Bespak for devices and Aesica for pharmaceuticals.

Challenges
A victim of its own success, Consort found itself in the position where it had outgrown many of its IT solutions and processes. Its large European network of employees, located across multiple sites, were not working in a standardised, transparent, collaborative or efficient way.

To meet its ambition of further expansion and innovation, the Group needed to prioritise digital transformation to simplify and secure company wide rollout of new systems, provide self-service to improve operating efficiency and enable collaborative working methods.

Jeremy Hyland, Interim IT Director at Consort Medical Group explains, “It became clear that Consort needed a common set of tools to deliver common services across the business. Our first priority was creating an IT service desk tool that would automate and enable self-service options for a whole range of IT processes that had been absorbing 70-80% of our IT department’s time unnecessarily.”

Solution
Consort identified a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that would provide self-service, and critically, common access for and visibility of all the users in the organisation, as the best fit for the business. However, it was clear that the downside would be the need for additional passwords for employees who typically already had three passwords each - an issue the Group felt would deter the company-wide use of the solution.

To guarantee the service desk tool would be used by all staff so the business could reap the benefits, it became clear the Group required a SaaS tool for single sign-on (SSO) with the ability to consolidate organisational data from the corporate Active Directory (AD) such as employee locations, contact numbers and email addresses.

After considering several different options, Consort chose OneLogin. The OneLogin solution stood out for not only enabling the Group to provide SSO, but for its unique ability to synchronise a range of AD custom fields, automatically provisioning users into SaaS applications. In turn, it also helped by reducing time spent on password recovery and simplifying internal IT processes.

Results
“Implementation was straightforward and completed in a day, and the synchronisation of user details was instantaneous,” says Hyland. “High levels of support were previously needed from our thinly stretched IT team and in the 12 months since we started working with OneLogin, our IT team’s time spent on service desk tasks has dropped significantly. We are now able to offer self-service facilities across multiple sites, which has greatly improved corporate efficiencies. Without OneLogin this would not have been viable. Employees now even use the OneLogin SaaS knowledge base articles for self-serve IT training.”

The on-boarding process for new employees has been dramatically simplified and Consort Medical Group can now create individual profiles, depending not only on job title but also location, even if they’re travelling. In addition, Consort has been able to massively streamline the process when an employee leaves the business – as soon as someone leaves and IT terminates their profile, the person’s access to the SaaS solution and all connected apps is automatically terminated. This has helped the business to meet compliance requirements at all times, and meet general pharmaceutical regulations and audit regulations.

Hyland adds, “OneLogin’s single sign-on services are enabling us to roll-out more SaaS applications to the organisation efficiently and with ease. We’re in the process of adopting a new HR system and have our sights on other systems to streamline business processes, such as quality management, document management, and Office 365. Without the tight role-based access control OneLogin affords us, it would be pretty much impossible for us to adopt any of these solutions successfully. Thankfully, this is something we no longer need to worry about.”

Why OneLogin?
OneLogin brings speed and integrity to the modern enterprise with an award-winning single sign-on and identity management platform. Our portfolio of solutions secure connections across all users, all devices and every application, helping enterprises drive new levels of business integrity and operational velocity across their entire app portfolios.