Improving efficiency of standardized workplace processes through automatization utilizing scripts : Using PowerShell to optimize onboarding

Abstract: As companies continue to rely more and more on information technology (IT) infrastructure, automation of most processes become increasingly viable as a way of improving efficiency and cutting costs. One such application area is staff and user management. This becomes more and more important as a company grows and hires more and more people, as manually doing these management tasks becomes increasingly time-consuming and repetitive. Moreover, these management tasks become very costly for the company in terms of cumulative man-hours and decrease the workplace enjoyment of the staff that handles this processing. Many companies rely on Active Directory (AD) as a way of managing their staff and users. With the help of PowerShell, onboarding and offboarding of users can be entirely automated - as will be described in this thesis. This thesis describes the design and analysis of the entire onboarding process for a company. This description covers the connection between the human resources (HR) and information technology (IT) systems, as well as the script that takes data from the HR system and uses it to create users in AD and assign basic access rights to the user. In addition, the scripts also handle offboarding, which involves disabling users, removing their access rights, and eventually deleting them from the AD. As the host company already had strict requirements for the onboarding process, there was little room for researching alternative models and designs for the system; therefore, this thesis focuses on the design and execution of the script rather than the design and analysis of the onboarding process. The results are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of accuracy and time saved in comparison with the manual execution of the same tasks. The conclusion is that using automation saves on average 585.155 seconds per new user. If a single person were to do 10 onboardings per day, this amounts to 40 hours per month, saving one entire work week each month. This automation can save money and resources by freeing this employee to focus on other projects and tasks.