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COMPANY: Cormar Carpets
INDUSTRY: Manufacturing
LOCATION: Lancashire, United Kingdom
About Cormar Carpets: Lancashire-based Cormar Carpets, one of the success stories of the British carpet industry, was established in the North of England in 1956 and today ranks as one of the leading carpet manufacturers in the UK. Over the past 50 years, Cormar Carpets has emphasized quality, service, and reliability, and continues to invest in maintaining and improving their standards. In fact, Cormar Carpets is held in such high esteem that it has won over 30 carpet and flooring industry awards, including being voted Best Carpet Manufacturer 2013 by readers of Interiors Monthly.
Users have embraced the new system and requests for password resets have almost vanished. Users are more aware their passwords are due to expire.
- David Earnshaw, IT manager, Cormar Carpets
When the employees of Cormar Carpets forgot their passwords and got locked out of their accounts, they had no choice but to call the IT office for assistance and wait for their response. However, it took the IT staff quite some time to verify the callers’ identities to ensure security and then reset their passwords in Active Directory. Meanwhile, users had no way of accessing their computers, which caused employee downtime.
They started searching for a solution that worked out of the box and was within their budget. Their initial choices were ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus, Thycotic, and Dell Password Manager. After evaluation, ADSelfService Plus emerged as the clear winner. There were many factors that lead to ADSelfService Plus being Cormar Carpets' final choice. One of them was the minimal configuration required to deploy the solution. Another factor that swayed Cormar Carpets' decision was the ability to tailor the license count to suit their requirements.
For Cormar Carpets, quality, service, and reliability are the foundation upon which the company was built. As a result, they take the utmost care to ensure that not only their customers, but also their employees enjoy the best quality service, including IT support.
When the employees of Cormar Carpets forgot their passwords and got locked out of their accounts, they had no choice but to call the IT office for assistance and wait for their response. However, it took the IT staff quite some time to verify the callers’ identities to ensure security and then reset their passwords in Active Directory. Meanwhile, users had no way of accessing their computers, which caused employee downtime. The problem was exacerbated during non-business hours when the IT office was closed.
The person in charge of IT operations at Cormar Carpets, David Earnshaw, said, “We were looking for a way to improve our response time to password requests, and also allow users to reset their own passwords when the IT office was closed.”
With lengthy password resets preventing employees from accessing their computers, Cormar Carpets decided to implement a self-service password management solution that would let end users reset their passwords on their own. They started searching for a solution that worked out of the box and was within their budget.
Their initial choices were ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus, Thycotic, and Dell Password Manager. After evaluation, ADSelfService Plus emerged as the clear winner.
There were many factors that lead to ADSelfService Plus being Cormar Carpets' final choice. One of them was the minimal configuration required to deploy the solution. ADSelfService Plus comes bundled with all the components required for a robust self-service password management system. There are no prerequisites involved—IT administrators can install the solution in their Windows domain and be up and running in a few minutes.
“[ADSelfService Plus] took minimal configuration. It was so simple that contact with the support team wasn’t really used,” Earnshaw stated.
Another factor that swayed Cormar Carpets' decision was the ability to tailor the license count to suit their requirements. By using the license management feature, Cormar Carpets was able to automatically restrict accounts that didn't require password self-service—such as service accounts, inactive user accounts, disabled users accounts, and expired user accounts—from the ADSelfService Plus console. Moreover, the ability to configure self-service password management for a select group of users using OU and group-based self-service policy configuration gave them even greater control over the license count.
When discussing why Cormar Carpets landed on ADSelfService Plus, Earnshaw said, “The main reason was being able to tailor the license count. This made it much more cost effective than other solutions.”
Apart from self-service password reset and account unlock, Cormar Carpets also used the password expiration notification feature in ADSelfService Plus, which helped them remind users about their impending password expiration.
Thanks to ADSelfService Plus’ intuitive user interface and user-friendly enrollment options, users quickly adopted the self-service management system to resolve password issues on their own. “Users have embraced the new system and requests for password resets have almost vanished. Users are more aware their passwords are due to expire,” Earnshaw explained about the impact of ADSelfService Plus.
With ADSelfService Plus, Cormar Carpets was able to drastically reduce the downtime employees faced and the number of password reset requests the IT office received. They were also able to notify users about their password expiration dates well in advance. This helped users change their passwords before expiration, further reducing password-related help desk calls.
