Transforming Workforce Identity and Access Management for a Large Retailer
How one of North America’s largest retailers streamlined onboarding and access at scale, saving millions annually.
Case Details
Client: Retail Giant
Tags: IAM, Retail
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The Story
Faced with the challenge of managing identity and access for 200,000 employees across 2,000 retail locations, a leading retailer partnered with N8 Identity to revolutionize their workforce access operations. Through innovative automation and AI-powered role management, the retailer drastically reduced onboarding times, eliminated compliance risks, and achieved over $10 million in annual savings.
About the Large Retailer
This North American retail giant operates over 2,000 stores and employs more than 200,000 individuals. With a massive and ever-changing workforce, the company must manage complex identity and access needs efficiently and securely—ensuring that store associates, managers, and support staff have the right permissions when and where they need them.
Challenges
Rapid talent acquisition, high turnover, and seasonal fluctuations characterize the retail sector. For this retailer, the traditional manual processes for onboarding, offboarding, and access reviews had become unwieldy at scale:
Labor-Intensive Onboarding: Store-level onboarding often took days as managers juggled over 100 different forms and approval chains for every new associate.
Excessive Manual Work: IT teams faced an unmanageable volume of identity-related tickets—over 140,000 per year—just to maintain routine access demands.
Compliance Risks: Disparate processes led to non-compliant changes, orphaned accounts, and audit challenges.
Resource Drain: The growth of the business demanded more staff to keep up with identity management, threatening to add 60+ full-time employees just for access administration.
Data Entry Redundancy: Multiple forms required repeated entry of the same data, leading to 600,000 redundant entries annually and increasing the risk of errors.
The Solution
N8 Identity deployed an intelligent, automated identity and access management (IAM) platform, transforming how the retailer handled workforce onboarding, access requests, and compliance:
Automated Onboarding & Offboarding: New hires are onboarded in minutes, not days, with instant, policy-driven assignment of all necessary store-level access.
AI-Based Role Management: 90% of all access requests are now pre-approved or automatically assigned by AI, ensuring the right permissions at the right time.
Ticketing Automation: Common access requests and changes are executed seamlessly and without manual intervention, dramatically lowering IT workload.
Form Consolidation: More than 100 legacy forms were merged and streamlined, eliminating unnecessary data entry and friction for managers.
Continuous Compliance: The platform enforces access policies and tracks changes, slashing non-compliant and orphaned accounts and supporting effortless audit-readiness.
The Results
The transition to an intelligent, automated IAM system quickly delivered substantial operational and financial results:
Customer Reviews of the Case
“N8 Identity’s platform fundamentally changed the way we think about workforce access—delivering speed, security, and compliance while saving millions each year.”