Canada’s Biggest Integrated Freight and Parcel Solutions Provider Speeds Deployment, Reduces Cost and offers Seamless SSO for New Enterprise Offering released a case study with Purolator, Canada’s leading integrated freight and parcel solutions provider. The company uses Okta’s single sign-on (SSO) solution to enable employees from its customer, Xerox Canada, to gain seamless access to Purolator’s E-Returns Portal from within the Xerox corporate network. Using Okta, Purolator was able to get this solution to market in record time, with reduced costs, resulting in increased revenue for Purolator and a seamless experience for the employees of Xerox Canada. In addition, by leveraging Okta, Purolator also has ensured that scaling to additional enterprise customers will be extremely fast and cost effective.
“Working with Purolator and Xerox to help them achieve their business goals and bring this integrated portal offering online in record time is a great example of what is possible when you leverage the power of a flexible cloud identity management service like Okta,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta. “Customer portals like these that are built on robust platforms like Salesforce.com are, by definition, in the cloud and for users that are outside of the firewall. Using a 100-percent on-demand service like Okta that is also in the cloud just makes business and technical sense. Companies everywhere are challenged with how to best offer single sign-on across their customer and partner portals, and the Okta service is here to help.”
Headquartered in Ontario, Canada, Purolator’s 11,500 employees deliver 1.3 million packages to customers around the world each day. In early 2011, Purolator and its IT provider, Innovapost, created an E-Returns Portal using Salesforce.com to help users process returns and track shipments. However, accessing the portal required a separate login and password through the native Salesforce.com login page. The challenges of this process were particularly acute for Xerox Canada, a Purolator customer that had just implemented a new SSO platform internally and provided its users with one login ID and password to access all of their internal Xerox web applications.
Purolator needed a solution to that would seamlessly authenticate Xerox employees into the Purolator E-Returns Portal and simplify the user experience – without requiring an additional username and password. In addition, Purolator also wanted to head down a path technically that would enable them to easily offer a similar experience to employees of future enterprise customers and generate more revenue from this investment. Purolator selected Okta to create a seamless user experience for the Xerox employees – and, together with Innovapost, finished the deployment of the new solutions within a very aggressive six-week timeline.
“If we had performed the SSO integration ourselves, it would have taken much longer and cost significantly more − keeping our IT team from performing other strategic IT assignments,” said Graeme Shiomi, director, solution delivery, Innovapost. “Leveraging Okta’s SaaS model and expertise was a great decision for us in terms of speed, costs and our resource utilization.”
With the new Okta integration, Xerox customers now only need one set of credentials and only need to log in once no matter which application they need – whether its to handle shipping and returns through Purolator or access a Xerox application. And as part of the Xerox Green World Alliance (GWA) program, the new portal also simplifies the process for users to ship used toner and supplies for recycling, helping to divert an estimated 673 thousand kilograms of spent imaging supplies from Canada’s landfills each year.
Purolator now also has the ability to scale the E-Returns solution to many other enterprise customers, and offer the employees of those customers the same seamless SSO experience from within their corporate network. Eliminating this barrier makes their offering more attractive and their revenue potential higher.
“Without Okta, we would not be able to scale the new E-Returns Portal we created for Xerox to create an offering for future corporate customers as well,” said Shiomi. “Okta has now become a trusted partner and advisor in identity management.”
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