Centrica Slashes Annual Helpdesk Costs with Simplified Sign-On for 45,000 Users
 
 

Centrica Slashes Annual Helpdesk Costs with Simplified Sign-On for 45,000 Users

  • Oracle Customer:  Centrica plc
    Location:  Windsor, United Kingdom
    Industry:  Utilities
    Employees:  39,432
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

Printer View Printer View

Centrica plc is an integrated energy company operating in seven countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States. A top-30, FTSE-100 company, the organization secures and supplies electricity and gas for 30 million consumer and business customers.

Centrica undertook a two-year strategic identity and access management program to improve user experience, strengthen security, and improve management control. As part of this program, Centrica brought its human resources (HR) applications in-house and implemented employee and manager self-service for 45,000 users. Single sign-on was a key to delivering seamless, self-service functionality, and Centrica worked with Oracle partner aurionPro SENA to implement Oracle Identity Federation to enable secure access for employees and partner organizations.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Centrica plc

  • "With Oracle Identity Federation, we have avoided significant costs while improving user experience, security, and management control. We’ve achieved a very successful, enterprisewide implementation, and I do not believe we would have realized the same results for the same investment with another vendor.” – Chris Wilton, Senior Project Manager, Centrica plc

  • Implement an enterprise-level, single-sign on solution that the company can use initially for self-service access to HR and payroll applications with the ability to roll out to additional applications in future
  • Provide 45,000 internal and external users―including employees and gas and electricity partner organizations―with secure application access
  • Reduce the number of helpdesk calls and costs associated with password and log-in issues

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Avoided significant annual costs spent on managing password resets
  • Reduced the number of helpdesk queries related to logging-on to just 100 within the first two months of operation, coming from a total of 45,000 employee and third-party users
  • Enabled single sign-on for the Web-based, self-service HR application across different domains, using industry best practice SAML2 authentication
  • Consolidated, streamlined, and simplified administration of 45,000 system users delivering gas and electricity services, to strengthen security, reduce costs, and improve management control
  • Used IT assets to their fullest extent to support Centrica’s efforts to deliver the best energy services to businesses and consumers

Partner

Oracle partner auroinPro SENA worked with Centrica to implement Oracle Identity Federation within six months, finalizing the design and providing a technical consultant on-site throughout the implementation.

“The aurionPro SENA team members were very professional, very helpful, and extremely knowledgeable. They played an integral role in helping us to optimize our investment in a secure, streamlined, and robust identity management solution and were especially proactive in transferring knowledge to our support partner, Infosys. I would definitely recommend them,” said Chris Wilton, senior project manager, Centrica.