Customer Story: LIXIL Future proofs its Global Identity Management System with Modern Cloud IGA

The Opportunity

LIXIL, headquartered in Tokyo, is a global leader in water and housing products. LIXIL offers pioneering solutions that make better homes a reality for everyone, everywhere, through a unique portfolio of global brands, including INAX, GROHE, and American Standard. LIXIL operates in more than 150 countries, and its products touch the lives of more than a billion people every day.

Each market LIXIL serves has distinctive language, culture, and local construction industries, requiring tailored customer service, on-time delivery, and specialized products. To maintain a competitive edge, LIXIL needed to create operational efficiencies across its global operations.

As a company, it is essential to create operational efficiencies to maintain competitive advantage in a sector where customers, contractors, installers and property developers are always looking for the best value.

LIXIL needed to bring value-creating efficiencies, as well as consistency and standardization, to its enterprise-wide identity management processes. The company’s existing approach to identity management was centered on a homegrown, bespoke application that had been built primarily for its Japanese employees.

The legacy system couldn’t scale to meet the needs of a growing international workforce, especially since LIXIL’s 2014 acquisition of Grohe brought a large number of Germany-based users into the company. These employees, along with others in Europe, must adhere to the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including data residency requirements.

LIXIL’s IT team envisioned a future where identity governance was streamlined, compliance was simplified and audits were a breeze. They aimed to empower employees with a seamless experience, boosting morale and fostering collaboration. To achieve this vision, LIXIL turned to Saviynt’s Identity Cloud.

The Solution

After an intensive evaluation process that took several months and included a successful pilot program, LIXIL selected Saviynt’s

Identity Governance & Administration (IGA). Saviynt’s IGA platform was able to meet LIXIL’s requirements, especially the key requirement to modernize legacy processes without disrupting operations due to the flexible cloud-native solution.

The solution’s ability to meet both global and diverse local requirements such as data residency for GDPR and Japanese language user interfaces in Japan were also strong points.

Our team collaborated with Saviynt Expert Services to engineer a successful multi-phase deployment. The strong relationships between the two teams kept the project on track and ensured high-quality outcomes.

Saviynt IGA could seamlessly ingest the complex file structures generated by legacy systems. The implementation also integrated modern cloud capabilities with existing processes. This enabled LIXIL to standardize identity management across an array of human resources (HR) databases from multiple different subsidiaries, simplifying compliance while unifying disparate systems and processes across the enterprise.

Along its cloud modernization journey, LIXIL adopted the human capital management system SuccessFactors, which will eventually become a single source of truth for identity. Their team is in the process of decommissioning its homegrown legacy identity management engine – a significant step towards greater efficiency.

LIXIL’s employees now enjoy faster, smoother onboarding processes, while the company benefits from reduced compliance and cybersecurity risks. Rapid, standardized offboarding, segregation of duties, better audit controls, and improved reporting capabilities all mitigate business risk cost-efficiently. The ability to integrate Third-Party Access Governance (TPAG) within a single platform makes it easy to extend these capabilities to a global network of vendors and contractors.

THE RESULTS

Saviynt IGA has helped LIXIL harmonize its identity management practices across a complex global ecosystem. Employee onboarding processes are now streamlined and consistent, governance has been improved, and it’s faster and easier to prepare for audits. Automation is creating compounding efficiencies, while the platform allows for centralized visibility and control. Next steps for LIXIL include implementing cloud-native privileged access management (PAM) and onboarding additional applications to build on their team’s momentum.