Reducing costs with Okta Workflows: The Wyndham Hotels and Resorts experience

Wyndham Hotels and Resorts is a leading hospitality company that has faced multiple challenges in managing Identity and Access Management for its franchise users. To overcome these challenges, the company decided to adopt Okta Workflows — a no-code Identity automation and orchestration platform that simplifies the process of creating and managing workflows for user provisioning and access management.

In this blog post, we will discuss the challenges faced by Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, why they chose Okta Workflows to address these challenges, how they implemented the workflows, and what the impact was.

The challenge

Wyndham Hotels and Resorts spent a significant amount of their budget towards ongoing development labor across their franchise. These key challenges included:

• Salesforce OIN app not supporting fetching attributes from custom objects
• Additional user profile is exposed in JSON format via REST
• Using event hooks to sync additional user profiles
• Custom scripts deployed on the server to sync user profiles periodically
• Maintaining 500+ lines of code, not suited for future growth 
• Need to keep up-to-date with code scans and vulnerabilities

In particular, the company had a dedicated franchise attendant who managed all the franchise users through Salesforce. However, they faced several challenges while using the Salesforce OIN app. One of the main challenges was that the app did not support fetching additional attributes from other custom objects. The user information was spread across different objects in Salesforce, and the company was unable to get the additional attributes using the out-of-the-box connector. This made it challenging for them to manage user profiles and keep them updated.

Implementing Okta Workflows

To overcome these challenges, the company decided to adopt Okta Workflows as it offered a low-code approach to user provisioning and access management. With Okta Workflows, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts could reduce the amount of development required, making it easier to troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

Wyndham Hotels and Resorts used Workflows to develop a custom Salesforce endpoint outside of Okta. This endpoint updates the user profile whenever a new user is created. For profile updates, the company developed a custom script outside of Okta that calls the Salesforce endpoint to modify and update the user profile.

The impact

The transition to Okta Workflows allowed Wyndham Hotels and Resorts to build and test faster. In particular, they were able to: 

• Reduce development time from three weeks to three days
• Reduce the cost of ongoing development labor by 85% by implementing the low-code approach
• Cut the time required for providing custom app access reports and scripts by 50%.

Furthermore, Okta admins can make changes to the workflows without requiring developers, making it easier for the company to manage user profiles and keep them updated.

Learn more

You can find out more about how Okta Workflows has helped other clients manage Identity automation — and how we can help your organization — below.

- Watch more Workflows video content

- Learn about example use cases/ pre-built templates

- Check out the Workflows Community Team blog