See How to Seamlessly Manage Employee Role Changes and Keep Access Secure|10th Oct 2025
600 Employees
The Chicago Botanic Garden is a 385-acre living museum spread across nine islands, founded in 1972. With 27 themed gardens, it attracts millions of visitors each year. People come here to experience the beauty of rare plants, fragrant flowers, and serene natural landscapes. The garden is also a conservation and horticultural research centre.
To support this mission, the organization has a workforce of 600+ employees. Most of these are seasonal or temporary workers who join as per requirement. From gardeners and landscapers to event staff and educators, these employees play a major role during peak visitor seasons. However, the seasonal nature of the hiring made workforce lifecycle management more complex, requiring careful coordination between HR and IT to ensure timely onboarding, access provisioning, and seasonal layoffs.
The Chicago Botanic Garden operates with a complex workforce model. It combines full-time staff with a significant number of seasonal and temporary employees. At its peak, the Garden hires more than 1000 individuals, who need timely access to communication and collaboration tools in order to perform their jobs effectively. The HR team relies on ADP to manage employee records, while IT supports a Hybrid Active Directory environment to handle user identities, mailboxes, and security groups.
This setup created challenges when it came to the Garden’s staffing needs. New hires required manual provisioning, including the setup of Active Directory accounts, security group assignments, and the enabling of remote mailboxes. Seasonal layoffs created additional cycles of work, as employees had to be deactivated and later rehired, often leading to delays or inconsistencies. With more than 1,700 hours annually consumed by account management tasks, both HR and IT were forced to put valuable resources to repetitive, error prone.
The biggest challenge for the Chicago Botanical Garden was the inefficiency of its manual workforce management processes, particularly given the high volume of seasonal staff changes. Onboarding new employees often involved multiple steps, entering information into ADP, requesting IT to create Active Directory accounts, enabling mailboxes, and assigning users to appropriate security groups. Each step led to potential delays, which sometimes left employees waiting for access to the systems they needed on their first day.
Managing seasonal layoffs and rehires was another challenge. Seasonal workers needed to be deactivated at the end of their contracts, but when they returned, IT often had to recreate accounts from scratch. This not only consumed time but also increased the risk of duplicate accounts, inconsistent permissions, and licensing problems. Meanwhile, HR and IT operated in silos, using different systems that did not communicate directly, which resulted in redundant data entry and higher chances of human error. Altogether, these fragmented processes drained over 1,700+ hours annually, reducing operational efficiency, and introduced unnecessary risk to the organization’s security.
Great middleware between your HRIS and Microsoft Azure/Entra
Hire2Retire is very easy to configure. It also allows for multiple configurations and complex situations. There is logic built-in that is very simliar to Excel’s formulas. The product doesn’t just create accounts and terminate accounts, but you have a lot of control over groups security, naming conventions, etc.
Matt L. (CIO)
Great middleware between your HRIS and Microsoft Azure/Entra
Hire2Retire is very easy to configure. It also allows for multiple configurations and complex situations. There is logic built-in that is very simliar to Excel’s formulas. The product doesn’t just create accounts and terminate accounts, but you have a lot of control over groups security, naming conventions, etc.
Matt L. (CIO)
To solve these challenges, the Chicago Botanical Garden implemented Hire2Retire (H2R), creating a direct integration between ADP and Hybrid Active Directory. This transformation automated the entire employee lifecycle, from onboarding to seasonal layoffs and rehires, reducing manual workload and strengthening security.
With Hire2Retire, onboarding became a smooth process. As soon as new employees were entered into ADP, their accounts were automatically provisioned in Active Directory. Remote mailboxes were enabled instantly, giving staff immediate access to communication tools. Role-based templates ensured employees received the right permissions from day one, whether they were gardeners, event staff, or educators.
The hiring nature of seasonal employment at the Garden was addressed with automated account suspension and reactivation. Instead of manually deactivating and recreating accounts, seasonal workers could be securely offboarded at the end of their contract and reactivated when they returned. This approach not only eliminated duplicate accounts but also retained historical data and reduced unnecessary licensing costs.
Security group membership was managed dynamically, based on employee data in ADP. This ensured staff always had the appropriate access as per their role, minimizing the risk of over-provisioning. Automated workflows also provided clear audit trails, strengthening compliance with internal policies and external regulations.
By automating these processes, the Garden reclaimed more than 1,700 hours annually that had previously been lost to repetitive account management. HR no longer needed to create IT tickets or chase follow-ups, as every workforce change in ADP triggered real-time updates in AD. This freed IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives and gave HR greater confidence in workforce accuracy and efficiency.
Ready to join the wave of companies automating their employee lifecycle management processes with Hire2Retire? Schedule a demo call with us today to see what Hire2Retire can do for your business.
600 Employees
