Groendyke Transport automated user life cycle management with AD360

About Groendyke Transport

Groendyke Transport is a family-owned trucking company with more than 90 years of experience serving gas stations, chemical plants, and other customers across the United States. With more than 40 locations and around 330 business users, the company relies on a growing IT environment to support its operations.

As Groendyke Transport continued modernizing its infrastructure and moving workloads to the cloud, the IT team wanted to reduce the manual effort involved in user life cycle management while gaining better visibility into activity across its environment.

Company

Groendyke Transport, Inc.

Industry

Transportation

Location

United States

Employee

330+

Business challenges

Groendyke Transport needed a more efficient way to manage the onboarding and offboarding of users while maintaining visibility into changes across its IT environment. Before it implemented AD360, user life cycle processes required manual intervention from the IT team. The organization wanted to automate user creation, access assignment, and termination while ensuring that information from Workday was accurately reflected in AD and other connected resources.

The team also needed stronger auditing capabilities to identify potentially risky changes, monitor privileged activity, and investigate events across its environment. With the company continuously moving workloads to the cloud, Groendyke Transport needed an approach that could support its existing infrastructure while giving the IT team greater flexibility to scale its operations.

"We wanted to automate the onboarding and offboarding of users and to have more insight through the auditing tool. Both of those were accomplished with AD360."

Rivr Smith, Infrastructure Systems Analyst, Groendyke Transport

The solutions

Groendyke Transport implemented AD360 to automate user life cycle management and improve visibility into its AD environment. The organization integrated AD360 with Workday to automate onboarding and offboarding based on employee information maintained by the HR team. The automation runs every 15 minutes and uses information such as an employee's office, manager, and job title to determine the appropriate account configuration and access.

The Workday integration

Automated onboarding

When a new employee is added to Workday, AD360 identifies the new hire and automatically provisions the user in AD. Based on the information received from Workday, ADManager Plus assigns them to the appropriate groups, places the user in the correct location in AD, creates their Microsoft 365 mailbox, and creates their folder on the file share. This eliminates repetitive manual steps and helps ensure that new employees receive the resources they need when they join the organization.

"So far we haven't had any issues with it whatsoever: no errors or anything like that."

Rivr Smith, Infrastructure Systems Analyst, Groendyke Transport

Controlled offboarding

Groendyke Transport also automated its termination process through AD360. The automation checks both current and recent termination records in Workday to account for situations where the HR team enters a termination after the employee's actual termination date. This additional flexibility helps ensure that termination events are not missed.

Once a termination is identified, AD360 removes the user from groups, disables the account, removes the Microsoft 365 license, and converts the mailbox into a shared mailbox. The employee's manager is then given ownership of the mailbox. This provides the IT team with a consistent, automated approach to removing access while preserving the information required by the business.

The ServiceDesk Plus integration

Groendyke Transport also integrated its identity management processes with ServiceDesk Plus. When an employee is onboarded or terminated, AD360 sends a notification to the ServiceDesk Plus inbox. A ticket is then automatically created based on predefined macros, connecting identity life cycle events with the organization's service desk processes.

"The integration between the two was pretty seamless. They both work together really well."

Rivr Smith, Infrastructure Systems Analyst, Groendyke Transport

Improved auditing and visibility

Alongside life cycle automation, Groendyke Transport uses ADAudit Plus to monitor activity across its environment. The solution helps the team identify potentially risky privilege changes, monitor sign-in activity, and investigate unusual events. It also provides a more efficient way to work with Windows event logs, enabling the team to filter and review relevant information without relying solely on the native Windows Event Viewer.

"If they're wanting to do a privilege escalation and give themselves domain administrator or operator [privileges], we get an alert anytime that happens and can respond to it."

Rivr Smith, Infrastructure Systems Analyst, Groendyke Transport

The implementation experience

Given the integration requirements between Workday, AD, Microsoft 365, file shares, and ServiceDesk Plus, Groendyke Transport opted for ManageEngine's implementation service, OnboardPro. Dixid, senior implementation consultant at ManageEngine, worked closely with the team throughout the implementation. While the project involved some technical challenges, the implementation team helped resolve them without disrupting the deployment.

"The implementation was great. I didn't really have any issues with the implementation at all."

Rivr Smith, Infrastructure Systems Analyst, Groendyke Transport

Rivr Smith, infrastructure systems analyst at Groendyke Transport, also highlighted the implementation team's technical knowledge and transparency when working through the project's requirements.

"He did fantastic throughout the whole process. He was very honest and really knowledgeable about the limitations of the product and what it could and couldn't do."

Rivr Smith, Infrastructure Systems Analyst, Groendyke Transport

The outcomes

By implementing AD360, Groendyke Transport has streamlined identity operations across its environment and reduced the amount of manual effort required from its IT team.

The organization has achieved the following:

  • Automated onboarding and offboarding through Workday
  • Consistent user and access provisioning
  • Automated Microsoft 365 license and mailbox management
  • Automated file share folder creation
  • Integrated identity workflows with ServiceDesk Plus
  • Improved visibility into AD activity
  • Faster investigations of security and privilege events
  • A scalable approach to identity management as workloads move to the cloud

With its identity life cycle and auditing processes working together, Groendyke Transport has created a more connected approach to managing users, access, and security across its IT environment.

"I'd say it's a toolbox. It's a lot of tools in one application that all work together to accomplish whatever you can think of."

Rivr Smith, Infrastructure Systems Analyst, Groendyke Transport

When asked to describe his overall experience with ManageEngine in one word, Smith said, "Seamless."

About AD360

ManageEngine AD360 is a unified identity platform that seamlessly connects people, technology and experiences while giving enterprises full visibility and control over their identity infrastructure. It offers automated life cycle management; secure SSO; adaptive MFA; and risk-based governance, auditing, compliance and identity analytics—all from a single, intuitive console. With extensive out-of-the-box integrations and support for custom connectors, AD360 easily integrates into existing IT ecosystems to enhance security and streamline identity operations. Trusted by leading enterprises across healthcare, finance, education, and government, AD360 simplifies identity management, fortifies security and ensures compliance with evolving regulatory standards. For more information, please visit https://www.manageengine.com/active-directory-360/.

About OnboardPro

OnboardPro is a ManageEngine service that provides solution implementation to clients upon request. This service includes the installation and customized configuration of ManageEngine solutions. It enables clients to seamlessly begin work without worrying about the complexities of product installation, deployment, and use. Every client environment is unique and requires additional support beyond the basic installation and standard features. With custom onboarding, clients have the option to engage a team of product experts to manage the installation, implementation, customization, and training based on their business needs. For more information, visit manageengine.com/onboarding/manageengine-onboardpro-iam-and-siem-professional-service.html.

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