CASE STUDY

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PepsiCo

Integrating Sun IDM Password Management with IVR

In 2009, Partners Consulting was engaged to create a mechanism that would allow employees and external users to privately and securely manage their IDM password without the requirement of using a computer. The company employs approximately 185,000 people worldwide, and its products are sold in approximately 200 countries. PepsiCo’s principal businesses include: Snack foods, Beverages, Sports drinks and Juices. They previously integrated a phone based helpdesk system that they were currently using to help their users deal with password issues and other computer and system related issues. The number of password calls to the helpdesk was increasing and more helpdesk personnel would be needed to support the calls. The goal was to assist PepsiCo’s users in resolving password issues without having to involve helpdesk personnel and to do this without requiring a computer interface.

The addition of an automated telephone password management option will:

• Enhance the user experience by providing a simple, automated, 24/7 solution for users who can't access a webpage.

• Significantly reduce help desk call volumes and their associated costs by automating the most common helpdesk request.

• Allow helpdesk technicians to focus more attention on more complex tasks, further enhancing responsiveness and customer satisfaction within their user community.

Solution 

The solution architecture was a simple extension of the existing IdM (Identity Management) and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems. In order to minimize the customizations to the IdM system that must be maintained, the IdM SPML interface was utilized for communication between the two systems.

SPML (“Service Provisioning Markup Language”) is a protocol that was created by the OASIS web-service standards organization to provide an

CASE STUDY

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open, standards-based method for systems to interoperate for provisioning requests. These requests are based on a common Request/Response model, and include the necessary features in order to support password management requests.

Sun Identity Manager has built-in native support for SPML that was utilized. In this case, IdM acts as the web service “provider” and IVR acts as the web service “consumer”. IVR will send SPML requests to IdM; IdM will process the request, and return an SPML response to the IVR application. The SPML SOAP Handler on the IdM server maps the SPML requests to native IdM function calls, such as querying a user, processing a form or view, launching workflows, and provisioning changes to the target applications via resource adapters.

The SPML protocol utilizes SOAP, a standard for web services which is based on XML for the message format and HTTP(S) for the transport protocol. All communication for the IVR Integration was done via secure HTTPS SPML calls on an encrypted, private WAN connection between the IVR and IDM systems.

Partners’ Consulting Approach 

Partners leveraged our 5D Methodology™ that we developed from our years of consulting experience. Using our methodology, we were able to provide expert oversight, monitoring, and reporting on the issues enabling the organization to make decisions that were best for their needs at the appropriate time throughout the project.

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Major Challenges Included: 

• Fine tuning Voice Recognition • Providing communication paths between two unlike systems. • The IVR system was untested and had not been used in the

companies environment before • IVR must be able to retrieve the IDM user’s authentication

questions and verbally ask the caller the questions. • IVR must understand a callers response to prompts even in

noisy environments

Sun Identity Manager 

Our customer, PepsiCo, had already integrated Sun Identity Manager to address their needs with respect to:

• New Account Requests (and updates) • Provisioning and De-provisioning • Password Self-Service

Partners Consulting Enabled Success 

• Took advantage of IDMs built-in native support for the SPML protocol

• Took advantage of the standard SOAP web services for message formatting

• All communication was through HTTPS SPML calls