Motion recommends AccessOwl to any growing company
About
Motion is a AI-based project-management tool, building a platform to help companies manage their resource allocations, time management, and planning
Industry
Software Development
Employees
20
Joiners/Leavers per month
Up to 10
Number of SaaS Tools
79
Founded
2019
Challenge
Manually managing user onboarding and user account provisioning
Outcome
Motion is saving 1.5h per onboarded employee while also making access requests SOC2 compliant and easy-to-use
Summary
Motion, an AI-based project-management tool, is building a platform to help companies manage their resource allocations, time management, and planning. As a growing startup, Motion needed a better way to onboard new employees, grant them access to the necessary company resources, and provide them with the right user permissions. So Motion turned to AccessOwl for help replacing error-prone manual processes with easy-to-set-up IT automations.
The Challenge
As a startup, Motion was facing challenges related to onboarding new employees. Ethan Yu, Motion's cofounder and COO, was not only responsible for the company's growth marketing, sales, and business operations, but also tasked with recruiting and onboarding those new employees and provisioning their accounts, "I hired all our employees, and I had to provision all their accounts, set up their onboarding, and make sure that their experience ramping up in the company was a smooth one," Ethan says.
Ethan felt the pain of having to manually complete the onboarding process — including provisioning accounts; granting employees access to the company resources, and ensuring that they had the right permissions.
"For user permissions, we had a ticketing template and a compliance workspace within our project management system, which is where we wrote what application a user needed to get access to, for what reason, and who the approver was," Ethan says. "But this was all done manually, and what happened was we basically had a shadow IT system where people got added to the service first before a ticket was created. So then we had to create a ticket, which was very reactionary."
For every employee the company hired, Ethan had to add them to about 20 different applications, which took several hours for each employee. In addition to spending a lot of time on this, Ethan had to ensure that he did it without making any mistakes.
"We had just hired 10 offshore contractors to do support tickets for us, and each of those people needs 10 applications," Ethan says. "I would have had to configure 100 applications — a huge pain point. And then we would've realized that we'd forgotten to add them to this one or to that one, and then it would've become a mad scramble. These were both pain points that we encountered."
While finding and hiring qualified workers is critical to any organization, Ethan understood that without a plan in place to help his employees prosper and succeed in their new roles, they would likely move on from his company before long. Ethan knew that to retain employees, he had to implement an effective way to successfully onboard new hires, provision and manage their accounts, grant them access to necessary company resources, and ensure that they had the right permissions.
The Solution
Motion's philosophy is to automate as much of its business processes as possible, including onboarding, account provisioning, and user permissioning. After researching various solutions to help Motion stay true to its philosophy, Ethan came across a blog post written by AccessOwl cofounder Philip Eller; the post documented Philip's own challenges with having to manually grant users access at his previous startups, as well as at other companies. In that post, Philip explained that, on average, IT teams wasted 30 minutes on every access request.
Ethan was impressed that with AccessOwl he could grant users access and programmatically provision their accounts without having to upgrade to the enterprise tier of the company's applications. Other solutions he'd investigated worked only with specific APIs (SCIM and/or SAML), which would often require enterprise upgrades.
"This really [piqued] my interest, and I saved the blog post," Ethan says. "And then after another month or two of feeling the pain points, I said, 'OK, we really need to get this today.'"
AccessOwl offers a Slack app that companies can use to request predefined applications easily, document their approvals, and manage user access. And AccessOwl also automates the onboarding and off-boarding processes.
The Result
"Onboarding probably went from two hours down to less than half an hour," Ethan says.
In addition, AccessOwl handles all account changes — creation, deletion, and updates — for all of Motion's software-as-a-service applications, and It works no matter what API is available.
"[In terms of the] implementation, the biggest thing that changed was that there is a clear way for employees to request access," Ethan says. "Before, there was a lot of confusion about who to talk to for what product, and it was always slow."
With AccessOwl, Motion is also able to quickly reject users' requests for access to resources that they don't actually need to do their jobs.
"There have been several times where people want something but it turns out they don't need it," Ethan says. "And we're able to write in a line that says, 'Hey, actually you don't need this tool to accomplish this.' And you can send that to them with a Slack message, which is a very fast turnaround time versus doing it via ticketing."
AccessOwl also enables Motion to stay compliant with SOC2 and offers a full audit trail to enable Motion to see who has access to what. In addition, AccessOwl allows Motion to schedule recurring access reviews. Using AccessOwl, Motion implemented a systematic way of granting and rejecting access through Slack messaging history, which helped the company become more proactive in staying compliant.
"The most impressive thing is how well the integration accounts work," Ethan says. "I was skeptical that the provisioning would actually work well, but it turned out to be pretty magical. I would recommend AccessOwl to any company that is growing aggressively and doesn't have an IT department or wants to delay having an IT department. If you find yourself repeatedly thinking about granting users access to tools, this is a no-brainer. We're very happy users of AccessOwl, and we look forward to growing our business along the way with their help."
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