The bigger the organization, the bigger the provisioning challenges. IT and unified communications (UC) engineers working in large enterprises know it’s not easy to onboard, off-board, or migrate many users at once. That’s what automated bulk provisioning is for.

When bulk user provisioning jobs come up, they can be a real challenge for UC and IT teams. Done manually these provisioning jobs can take a lot of time and lead to a lot of errors.

In this article, we’re going to cover some of the challenges of provisioning users manually and how an automated provisioning solution can help solve those challenges and streamline MACD workflows in bulk.

3 Downsides of Manual Bulk Provisioning

Manual provisioning means your UC or IT teams are provisioning each user in every app, one at a time. It is time-consuming to say the least. If you know a large provisioning job could be around the corner, here’s why you may want to move away from a manual process.

#1. It’s Grueling, Time-Consuming Work

First, manually provisioning even one user takes time. Multiply that over hundreds of users and many different UC apps, and it turns into a grueling slog for your IT team. This leads to the next point.

#2. It Leads to Errors

Human error is inevitable in long, repetitive, manual work. It’s easy for people to lose focus when doing the same thing repeatedly.

These small errors can have major consequences. They can delay the roll out of UC tools to new employees and take up even more time and resources to fix. They can even cause disruptions or outages in critical UC systems, which means you must pull in more people to fix a problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

#3. It’s a Poor Use of Resources

Those first two downsides combine into manual provisioning being a poor inefficient use of resources.

Manual provisioning hampers the productivity of your IT and UC teams and your entire organization. It also takes your IT teams away from more strategic projects and initiatives.

3 Benefits of Automated Bulk Provisioning

How do you overcome the downsides of manual provisioning?

The short answer is automation.

An automated provisioning solution solves the downsides of manual provisioning by increasing productivity, saving time and cutting down on human error. Here’s how.

#1. Increases Productivity

An automated provisioning software solution lets you process and provision a large number of users in one simple CSV file upload.

That minimizes repetitive work and allows UC teams to use a single pane of glass to initiate workflows across multiple UC apps, servers, and clusters.

#2. Saves Time & Resources

That increase in productivity translates directly into time and resource savings. With automated bulk provisioning features, you can take a job that could have taken weeks and reduce it down into one weekend.

This gives time back to your IT and UC teams to focus on more resource intensive and strategic projects that solve for greater business needs.

#3. Cuts Down on Human Error

Lastly, automated bulk provision cuts out human error by enabling the use of a structured job template to define what UC services an employee should get, reducing the number of times a human needs to interact with the provisioning process.

Furthermore, by executing provisioning actions in a provisioning automation tool, vs. directly in the UC platform, this reduces the possibility that there will be disruptions of service or even potentially outages in your UC platform.

Features to Consider in a Bulk Provisioning Solution

So, you know that your company needs a bulk provisioning solution. The question then becomes what features should you look for in a solution provider?

Here are some features that you’ll want to look for in an automated provisioning solution to handle bulk jobs.

  • Support for add and delete job types
  • Job templates that allow for consistency
  • Intuitive and easy to use, drag-and-drop user interface
  • An allowance for scheduling or executing your bulk provisioning job in real-time
  • A self-service portal

That last feature is an essential (and often overlooked) feature for large migrations. It cuts down on tickets after the migration and it gives users the ability to execute easy information change tasks on their own.

Conclusion – User Provisioning Software is a Must

If you must provision a large number of users at once across your UC environment, doing the job manually won’t cut it. You need an automated provisioning solution to handle these jobs in bulk.

Looking for a bulk provisioning solution? Get in touch with Akkadian Labs. Let us show you how easy your next bulk provisioning job can be.