Ipeco Holdings Limited

The Client

Ipeco Holdings Limited was founded in 1960 and is a world leader in aircraft crew seating with a growing presence in executive jet passenger seating and aircraft galley inserts. Ipeco is a global company operating on several continents and continually strives to offer its customers total flexibility, integrity, reliability and satisfaction.

Ipeco has seen considerable growth in recent years, which it believes underlines the valuable and developing long-term relationships it holds with both its customers and suppliers. Ipeco invests heavily in seeking innovation and process change across its products and services to meet and exceed customer expectations.

EUM has provided Ipeco with an effective solution to enable our customers to self-register for access to the Ipeco SharePoint portal where they can access documents. The registration process for our customers is clear and concise, and the administration side is simple and user friendly. The communication from EUM has been exceptional through this process, and their knowledge has allowed Ipeco to successfully implement this solution, despite many technical challenges.

The Challenge

For every new Ipeco customer, there is a series of post-purchase documents that are sent to the client. Prior to exploring their options with SharePoint Online, this was a very manual process that was quite onerous for Ipeco to maintain, especially as their customer base continues to expand. Previously, Ipeco would load the post-purchase documents onto a CD-ROM and mail to the customer. Naturally when products go further into maturity, maintenance and product specific documentation can evolve as time goes on which means a new CD-ROM would have to be packaged and shipped to all existing customers.

On a continuous basis, Ipeco is engaging with their existing client base to ensure they are providing the best services possible. One of the regular requests from its annual client satisfaction survey was for Ipeco to build a customer facing portal where the latest product documentation could be easily accessed. Considering the Company was already leveraging Office 365 internally, utilizing SharePoint Online to build out this client extranet was a no-brainer.

When Ipeco began investigating what was available to them out of the box in Office 365 via external sharing and/or Azure AD B2B, it quickly realized that it required a solution to go beyond the basic functionality that these options provide. Ipeco required a self service user registration application that would allow end users to discover the client extranet and request access from an anonymous source. From this initial access request, there needed to be a formal approval process in place to verify the request as well as associate the correct permissions with that customer. With this in mind, Ipeco approached Extranet User Manager to better understand their value add to Azure AD B2B.

The Solution

Extranet User Manager was able to provide the additional functionalities Ipeco was looking for including a customizable self registration, an approval process and delegated administration of the external customers. Ipeco was able to leverage much of what is available out of the box in the EUM self registration component, however it wanted to capture more information about the users registering in order to determine the correct level of user access required. Additionally, Ipeco has only allocated a single Customer Support Administrator to manage these external customer accounts. This Administrator does not have global admin access to Ipeco's Azure environment, which would be required if it chose to use Azure AD B2B out of the box. However, the Administrator is still able to create Guest users in the Azure AD through EUM's simplified administration user interface.

In addition to the core EUM functionalities above, Ipeco decided to take advantage of Azure AD B2B's One Time Passcode (OTP) authentication which greatly simplifies the user login experience. It has subsequently seen a significant increase in the rate of successful logins from its customer base thus far.

The Results

The client extranet went live on May 1st 2019 and continues to see a steady rate of adoption. Currently Ipeco has onboarded 324 external users from 226 client organizations. So far, clients are happy with the registration through to login process. And the core ability to access product documents that are up to date at any time of day brings an increased satisfaction level to its customer base.