0
Day-1 Access Issues
5
Onboarding Lead Time
Hours
Offboarding Time
100
Audit Trail
Challenge
Round Glass, a wellness and lifestyle company with a growing workforce, was managing employee onboarding manually across two disconnected systems — Zoho HR for people records and Microsoft Azure Active Directory for identity, email, and access provisioning. Every new hire required an IT administrator to manually create an Azure account, assign email groups, configure licence entitlements, and notify relevant teams — all after joining day, which meant new employees often arrived on Day 1 without email access or the tools they needed to work. The reverse problem was equally costly: departing employees' Azure accounts and group memberships were not being deprovisioned promptly, creating both a security exposure and licence wastage. There was no automation, no audit trail, and no advance scheduling — the entire flow depended on human memory and manual tickets.
Solution
Dcrayons designed and built a Node.js automation service backed by PostgreSQL that acts as a continuous sync bridge between Zoho HR and Microsoft Azure Active Directory. The service polls Zoho HR for joining date changes and triggers a provisioning workflow five days before a new employee's start date — giving IT and the new hire enough lead time to be productive on Day 1. On the Azure side, the service creates the employee's Microsoft account, assigns them to the correct email distribution groups and security groups based on their department and role, provisions licences, and sends a welcome notification to the manager and IT team. The five-day advance window was configurable per department and role tier. For offboarding, the service monitors Zoho HR for exit dates and status changes. On the employee's last working day, it automatically revokes group memberships, suspends the Azure account, strips licence assignments, and logs every action to a PostgreSQL audit table with timestamps, operator identity, and before/after state. All sync events — both successful and failed — are written to a durable event log, giving the HR and IT teams a searchable, exportable history of every provisioning action. Failures trigger Slack alerts so nothing slips through silently.
Results
The automation eliminated 100% of the manual provisioning workload for IT on each hire and exit cycle. New employees had their Azure accounts, email group access, and licences ready five days before joining — the first cohort onboarded post-deployment reported zero Day-1 access issues compared to the previous norm of 2-4 support tickets per new hire. Offboarding security exposure was closed: all departing accounts are now suspended within hours of exit date, not days or weeks. Licence reclamation freed up recurring cost on Microsoft 365 seats that were previously left active post-departure. The PostgreSQL audit log gave the HR and compliance teams a full, timestamped record of every identity action — something they had never had before.
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