One Identity Manager celebrates its fifth anniversary at MTU Aero Engines

Benefits

• Saves up to 300 working days every year
• Raises identity and access management scalability
• Reduces auditing tasks from days to minutes
• Providing end user self-services

The Story

MTU Aero Engines uses the One Identity Manager to provide the ability to meet the constant growth in locations, employees, necessary access and increasingly stringent compliance requirements.

MTU Aero Engines is Germany’s leading engine manufacturer and an established global player with approximately 11,000 employees based in 18 locations around the world. Its engine technologies power commercial airlines carrying passengers and freight. They also power military aircraft belonging to the German Armed Forces, as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance.

Before introducing a new IAM system MTU’s former IAM solution lacked automation and integration with business-critical software systems, which caused errors and delays. The switch to a new platform marked the start of a journey to automate as many processes as possible and harden the system to reduce the error rate as much as possible.

A flexible solution backed by professional services

MTU Aero Engines reviewed leading IAM solutions on the market before choosing Identity Manager. “I am glad that we chose One Identity Manager as our IAM solution as it offers a great tool for us to build upon and lets us have enough room for customizations which are implemented by a great team who understand our requirements and help us find or even define best practices wherever possible,” says Andreas Wimmer, system architect for the One Identity Manager at MTU in Munich.

Saving 300 days of yearly work and enabling scalability

Within five years MTU used the flexibility of customizing the One Identity Manager to integrate all of its main data sources like SAP HR and automated the de-/provisioning of many target systems like Active Directory, Exchange, SAP etc. as well as a lot of MTU specific applications. “Making sure to use as much of One Identity Manager’s out of the box potential we also worked on implementing MTU specific standards for connecting target systems to now save up to 300 days each year on manual tasks since we started five years ago,” Wimmer comments. Additionally, to connecting new systems to the One Identity Manager MTU’s IAM team also automated many processes and gave access to these automations by introducing the IT-Webshop portal to their employees. “Automating our processes and making them easy to access for our colleagues increased the speed of IAM processes like onboarding of new employees and requesting additional system accounts and permissions,” Wimmer said.

Auditing no longer takes days - it’s instant

The company can also provide auditors with realtime governance reports on application access among personnel. “Audits used to take huge amounts of time. For instance, our half-yearly audit took three working days with our legacy IAM system, but we can produce audit reports almost instantly using a customized audit report in One Identity Manager,” adds Carolin Wassmuth, IAM subject expert.

Celebrating the fifth anniversary of a very stable IAM system

To always be able to further improve their system without having to fear the consequence of too much complexity MTU implemented a ‘Zero Error Tolerance’ protocol. With this protocol every error at MTU is not a task for an operations team to work around but for the IAM team to fix, so it does not happen again. “Even after everything we implemented in the past five years in the One Identity Manager at MTU Aero Engines our system is extremely stable with almost no errors coming up. This enables us to never have to stop to look for new ideas to improve our system because of the fear of additional sources of errors,” said Wimmer.