200 Employees
Biomedical research companies adhere to strict compliance standards for the safety, efficacy, and quality of medical products before they reach the public. They also need to maintain data integrity and ethical standards during clinical trials. Therefore, immediate access provisioning and deprovisioning became a necessity for these organizations to avoid compliance risks.
For Northern Biomedical Research, a life sciences organization operating under the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), keeping audit-ready compliance logs is how they stay in business.
For a long time, none of that was automated; HR would update the record in ADP. Then someone on the IT team would manually open tickets, type in employee details, update Active Directory, and run periodic audits. Although it worked for a while, this process was slow and error-prone. As the organization grew, compliance risks continued to increase, making manual processes outdated.
Northern Bio is a preclinical CRO that specializes in targeted drug delivery, molecular biology, and bioanalysis to develop safe and effective treatments for devastating diseases. Using advanced surgical techniques and research, they maximize therapeutic impact.
Committed to excellence, Northern Bio transforms possibilities into reality, paving the way for better lives through rigorous research and scientific advancement.
Before implementing Hire2Retire, Northern Biomedical Research was managing employee onboarding, access changes, and org chart updates manually. The process was slow, relied on too many back-and-forths among staff, and left room for hard-to-identify errors that caused significant problems later.
Key challenges that Northern Bio faced were:
Two Org Charts: Northern Bio maintained two organizational charts: one in ADP and another in SharePoint, at all times. To comply with FDA regulations, it was essential for them to keep the org structure updated and accurate in both systems. However, keeping them in sync required regular manual audits, which was a significant pain point for the IT team.
Error-Prone Associate ID Entries: When a new employee was set up in ADP, someone in the IT team had to manually enter the employee’s Associate ID from ADP to Active Directory. A typo, transposed digit, or missed number would cause a data mismatch between the two systems. For Northern Bio, where audit logs must tie back to the right person, incorrect identity data creates compliance risks.
Multi-Step Manual Onboarding: Getting a new employee set up required HR to open an onboarding ticket, wait for management approval, and then have IT create an account and configure access in AD. Every step depended on someone completing the previous one, making onboarding delays common.
Northern Bio implemented Hire2Retire to automate the employee lifecycle management by connecting ADP directly to their Hybrid Active Directory environment.
Now, when a new hire record is created, or an existing employee’s record is updated in ADP. Hire2Retire automatically detects the changes to provision or updates the corresponding account in Active Directory. Then, revise Organizational Unit (OU), group memberships, and role-based access rights accordingly.
Hire2Retire also helped Northern Biomedical Research disable the employee account and revoke all access immediately based on ADP termination updates. Hire2Retire also handles former employees’ mailboxes on their last working day as per the organization’s termination policies.
As the employee’s Associate ID is directly mapped from ADP to AD, the need for manual transcription becomes zero.
Every event processed by Hire2Retire for Northern Biomedical Research gets logged with a full audit trail. So that they have all the records on provisioning, deprovisioning, access updates, and role changes in a format that supports FDA compliance reporting.
With Hire2Retire in place, HR and IT now work from the same version of data. By making ADP the single source of truth, Hire2Retire assured that everything downstream updates automatically.
Benefits after implementing Hire2Retire are:
Accurate Employee Provisioning from Day 1: New hires have their accounts, access, and group memberships fully set up and ready when they walk in the door.
Org Chart Data Stays Current in both systems: Changes to org structure in ADP automatically updates the data on Hybrid AD environments. This keeps AD and SharePoint org charts in sync for FDA compliance audits.
Manual Associate ID Entry is no longer needed: Associate ID is directly mapped from ADP to AD by the integration. This eliminates transcription errors to keep identity records clean.
Reliable and Fast Offboarding: With Hire2Retire, the accounts of terminated employees are disabled, access is revoked, and mailboxes are handled automatically.
Full Audit Trail for Compliance: Every identity and access event is logged to provide documentation needed for compliance reporting without any extra manual effort.
For a research organization operating under strict compliance regulations, the value Hire2Retire offers goes beyond saving time. It removes the risks that come from wrong IDs in Active Directory, orphaned accounts, or mismatched org charts. Then replace them with an automated, auditable workflow that runs every time a change happens in ADP. This reduced HR and IT workload for Northern Bio by up to 70% and cost by 60%.
By automating the employee lifecycle with Hire2Retire, Northern Biomedical Research has a cleaner, more secure identity environment and the confidence that its HR and IT data are always in step with each other.
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200 Employees