LOCKTON, INC.

Expediting Time-to-Onboard for Hundreds of Business-Critical Contractors

The Client

Lockton, Inc.— the world’s largest, privately-held, independent insurance brokerage firm — relies on hundreds of contractors annually to run operations across its insurance, risk management, employee benefits and retirement services.

Lockton engaged Netrix to automate and scale its contractor onboarding process. They envisioned creating an automated application to eliminate the expensive, spreadsheet-driven overhead previously required to ensure new contractors receive appropriate role assignments, system access and enterprise accounts.

The ambitious collaboration produced a streamlined, one-stop application for hiring managers. The new system tracks contractors through the onboarding and offboarding lifecycles, automatically garnering executive approvals and providing a snapshot of each new hire’s system access across Lockton’s enterprise application portfolio.

The Challenge

Lockton’s onboarding and offboarding routines require approvals at multiple levels across business verticals. A flexible and extensible solution was developed to allow additional roles, systems and approvers as it gains adoption.  Administrators define roles and hiring managers request approval for contractor role assignments. The approved role assignments generate tasks for system administrators to complete all account creations and license assignments required to fulfill that role.

Onboarding/Offboarding Process Automation

  • Eliminate dual data entry and manual tracking in spreadsheets
  • Single application to onboard, offboard, approve and provide system access to contractors
  • 1-click approvals directly in email
  • Robust audit trail and dynamic, filterable reporting

The Team

Netrix delivered this project using The Netrix Way: our transparent delivery approach that provides clients the flexibility to adjust scope while maximizing their budget.

Netrix Way teams ensure quality and transparency with project management, business analysis and quality assurance workstreams.

The Engagement

  • An iterative process with frequent solution demos for client business stakeholders, allowing for feedback after every iteration.
  • Azure DevOps tracks Application Lifecycle Management from user stories to automated deployments and testing.
  • We host monthly Executive Review meetings with executive leadership from Netrix and our client, providing an opportunity to speak candidly about team performance and project direction.
  • We send Sprint Summary Reports after every sprint with burndown, velocity and backlog metrics to keep projects on time and on budget.

The Solution

Following process mapping exercises with key stakeholders, Netrix recommended shifting several “per-contractor” approvals to  “per-role” approvals. This allows a single role-level approval to suffice for all contractors hired to the same role and returning valuable cycles to executive approvers.

The new solution was designed and built utilizing Lockton’s existing Microsoft 365 license agreement. This allowed Lockton to maximize their investment by harnessing the low-code Power Platform to implement a universally deployable application with custom forms (PowerApps) backed by a flexible workflow engine (Power Automate) and powerful reporting (Power BI).

The new application:

  • Provides rollups of all contractors and their status, role assignments and system access in a single interface.
  • Generates one-click actionable emails, allowing approvers to complete onboarding tasks without leaving their inbox.
  • Scales to accommodate new roles, systems and approvers without additional development.

Netrixdelivered this project on-time and on-budget, marking one of Lockton’s first production-ready applications on the Microsoft 365 Power Platform.  The estimated time required to onboard a single contractor shrank from weeks to days — sometimes mere hours — and the entire process now lives in a single, streamlined and secure application.

The Result

Pains

  • Legacy contractor onboarding/offboarding process relied on manual, spreadsheet-based collaboration and duplicate data entry
  • Email-based approval produced no audit trail and required manual follow-up
  • Hiring managers checked multiple systems of record to learn the status of onboarding tasks and access requests
  • Resource-intensive, manual processes lacked transparency and were subject to human error

Gains

  • Single application to manage the entire onboarding/offboarding process
  • Auto-generated approval requests can be completed directly in email
  • Interactive dashboard reports provide at-a-glance rollups that can be filtered and sorted by contracting firm, territory and other data points
  • Flexible, scalable architecture supports addition of new roles, systems and approvers without new development
  • Automated and auditable process guarantees compliance and security while minimizing human error

Experience The Impact

No matter what challenge you’re facing today, our team of technical experts can get you started on a path to a better solution. We’ll partner with you to: 

  • Understand your current technology environment
  • Interview key stakeholders to understand the root of the business issue(s)
  • Propose a solution with projected timelines, budget, and dependencies