See How Hire2Retire Can Drive Success for Your Organization |17th Jan 2025|

CASE STUDY

How Katerra efficiently manages a massive workforce spread around the globe

Timely Terminations
Superior "First Day at Work"
Enhanced HR-IT Efficiency
Role based access control

Industry

Company Size

5,001-10,000 employees

Implemented Solution

Customer

Katerra

Situation

Katerra is a fast-growing construction company from Silicon Valley, funded by investors like Softbank, that uses technology to revolutionize the construction industry. By putting modern technology to work at every level of building design and construction, Katerra can address some of the industry’s biggest challenges. 

Back in June of 2017, Katerra decided it was time to find a robust solution to effectively manage the employee lifecycle to support its rapid growth. Onboarding employees can be a tedious and repetitive task, and for a large construction company like Katerra, there are thousands of employees that need to be managed across its locations all around the globe. Katerra required a solution that was fully hosted, operated, and managed by the provider – a type of solution referred to as a SaaS (Solution as a Service) in the tech world. The solution would need to manage the employee lifecycle from the Human Resource Information System (HRIS), ADP, to Active Directory for user identity and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

Struggles and Pains

Over the last two years, Katerra has grown from 650 employees to 6,500 plus employees. This sort of rapid growth requires a massive amount of management to track and keep everything in line and running smoothly. 

In the absence of a full-featured, pre-built solution, Katerra would have to hire multiple system administrators just to manage the work necessary of onboarding employees, applying access rules and any additional policies over time. This would require the system admins, on average, at least two hours to onboard a new employee. With a workforce numbering in the thousands, it’s a monumental amount of time dedicated to a repetitive, manual task. 

The amount of work increases when we factor in the many application accounts and multitude of permissions that must be provisioned, depending on the role and the department of the employee. The other option that Katerra could have taken would have been to have a custom solution built that would have taken months to complete and would be neither as feature-rich nor as robust as the ADP to AD SaaS solution offered by RoboMQ.

Resolution

RoboMQ’s ADP to AD integration automates employee lifecycle events, such as new hire, change of roles, leave, termination and re-hire. This solution integrates APIs provided by Katerra’s ADP, Active Directory (AD), and ServiceNow accounts. 

AD accounts are created, updated or deleted based on employee lifecycle updates from ADP or HRIS (Human Resources Information System), which serves as the source of truth for the employee data. The employees’ data is mapped to security groups, organization units (OU), and distribution lists (DL) based on the specific combination of attributes in the ADP feed. Rules for this mapping are provided by Katerra and can be updated as necessary. Continuing the automation, tickets or cases are either opened or closed in ServiceNow for auditing (and tracking) purposes. In the event that any errors are detected in the ADP to AD integration, emails or SMS alerts are sent out. 

Best of all, the entire solution is fully managed and hosted by RoboMQ on its cloud. This means that instead of spending thousands of man-hours onboarding, Katerra lets RoboMQ’s Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) do the heavy lifting, saving time and money. 

As time passed, Katerra’s integration needs grew, and RoboMQ was happy to increase the scope of its SaaS solution. In 2017, RoboMQ provided an add-on that allowed Katerra to perform role-based user provisioning, lifecycle management, license management, groups, and distribution list association in Office 365. In 2018, RoboMQ provided an additional API integration add-on to integrate Mailchimp employee communication lists with employee onboarding and lifecycle events in ADP. Memberships in Mailchimp can be automatically created and updated as new employees are brought into ADP and will be canceled upon termination. 

In 2019, Katerra upgraded its HRIS from ADP to Workday®. RoboMQ helped Katerra achieve a seamless transition, minimizing the impact of the HR system change to downstream application by switching the integration endpoint from ADP to Workday®. 

By using RoboMQ’s ADP to AD integration, Katerra gained the following benefits: 

A streamlined and automated process to manage employee lifecycle of 6,500+ employees around the globe, leading to cost saving of highly valuable system admin time

Avoidance of security, compliance and reputation risk by ensuring terminated employees do not walk away with privileged access

Higher employee satisfaction and improved first day at work experience, with new employee setup—all ready to go on day one

Want to learn more?

Ready to join the wave of companies automating their employee lifecycle management processes with Hire2Retire? Schedule a demo call with us today to see what Hire2Retire can do for your business. 

RoboMQ is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with any of HR systems that it provides integration with and are mentioned in this case study. All product and company names are the registered trademarks of their original owners.

MORE CASE STUDIES