About MassMutual Mercuries Life
Formed as a merger between Mercuries Life Insurance and the MassMutual Financial Group, MMML ranked seventh in the industry in 1997 for total premium income. The company employs 12,000 staff, operates from seven branch and administrative offices across Taiwan, and has 1,100 office staff, 13,000 field personnel and 1.4 million customers.
Challenge
With many office-based staff that depend on corporate IT systems to support their day-to-day work, the MMML IT department needs to manage a large number of user accounts and desktop PCs.
"Since we did not have a centralised way of managing either users or PCs, our IT teams spent a lot of time on low-level administrative work," said Ms. Maggie Chou, IT Project Leader at MMML. "For example, I was responsible for the corporate e-mail system, and when a new employee joined the company I had to set up their account manually. Five other people were responsible for managing accounts for various other systems."
Asset management for company's PCs was also a challenge. It was difficult to find out what software was installed on which machines - which had implications for licence management—and new software had to be installed manually. As the company has offices across the country, this led to a lot of travel for IT staff—wasting time and reducing responsiveness.
Novell Solution
MMML decided to find a solution for both identity and asset management, and opted to work with Apulse Technical Communication, a Novell Gold Partner, to design and deploy a solution.
"We looked at solutions from several vendors, but none of them offered such a comprehensive range of functionalities as Novell," said Maggie Chou. "We were also impressed with the Apulse team's project management skills, working closely with our in-house team to create and implement a solution that would meet our needs."
Apulse helped MMML implement a solution based around Novell® Identity Manager, Novell iFolder®, Novell SecureLogin and Novell ZENworks® Suite with Novell ZENworks Asset Management.
Novell Identity Manager automates the user account creation and deletion process for MMML's major corporate systems. When an employee is added or removed from the company's HR system, accounts are created or deleted in all the other systems, eliminating manual work and boosting security.
Novell ZENworks Suite provides centralised asset management, software provisioning and remote IT support, helping the IT team audit and maintain the company's PCs and deploy software quickly. If new applications need to be deployed, installation can be performed remotely. Equally, when technical problems arise, IT staff can take remote control of a user's desktop and resolve them immediately.
Novell iFolder ensures that data on individual PCs is kept safe, by synchronising files with a corporate file server. This protects important business data and enables users to access their documents from any location.
Finally, Novell SecureLogin increases ease-of-use and improves IT security by providing single sign-on for all applications. Users only need to remember a single username and password, and workload for IT staff is reduced, as there is no need to reset forgotten passwords manually.
Results
The combination of Novell solutions has helped MMML to simplify end-user computer management workload significantly. With no need to visit individual machines to deploy software or provide technical support, IT staff rarely need to travel between sites, which saves considerable time and expense. Automated identity management and a self-service password reset portal also reduce manual workload, and help the IT team to concentrate on higher-level objectives such as IT development and strategy.
"Overall, the Novell solutions have simplified our IT department's administrative workload in end-user management by as much as 80 percent," said Maggie Chou. "Besides the administrative savings, Novell ZENworks Asset Management also helps to reduce business risk and increase compliance. We can easily audit the entire PC estate and calculate exactly how many software licences we need to buy - avoiding the risk of over-spending on software."
Another benefit is speed of response. By using Novell Identity Manager to provide automated user account creation, MMML has been able to reduce the time it takes to give access to a new employee from two days to just ten minutes. Equally, using Novell ZENworks for remote assistance with technical issues helps to get users back online more quickly—so they can concentrate on their own work instead of worrying about IT issues.
"By enabling us to solve problems more quickly, the Novell software helps us improve the productivity of both IT staff and business users," said Maggie Chou. "Ultimately, this improves the efficiency of our business and helps us deliver better value to our customers."