Automate the boring parts of IT with Rippling

Picture this: You’re part of a lean IT team that constantly struggles to stay aligned with HR, especially when employees join, change roles, or leave the company. 

In other words, you rely on employee data from HR to set up the correct accounts, determine access levels, provision devices, and enforce security measures. The main issue is that IT and HR systems lack seamless integration, leading to inefficient manual processes. This results in a never-ending cycle of tedious, error-prone tasks where one tiny mistake, like a misspelled name or missed access removal, could create major security and compliance risks.

This is why Rippling is pioneering an innovative approach that bridges the traditional IT and HR divide through its unified workforce management platform. 

Rippling is the world's first workforce cloud platform that natively combines IT management, HR, and everything else you need to run a company into one unified system. 

At its core, Rippling establishes a centralized Employee Graph, which is a rich user directory containing every worker's complete profile, role, devices, applications, and more. Because we natively built all of our IT products from the start, Rippling can automate away more busy work than traditional point solutions. Let’s walk through how Rippling makes it easy for new hires to get started and keep things running smoothly throughout the entire employee lifecycle.

Accelerate productivity for new hires

Ask any IT leader, and they'll tell you horror stories of onboarding gone wrong.  The dreaded Monday morning packed with new hire orientations answering, “What’s the WiFi password?” on repeat. Or Fridays at 5:01 pm spent configuring laptops and playing telephone with HR.

Getting new employees up and running with the right software, accounts, and devices seems way harder than it should be.

Traditionally, IT has relied on ticketing systems or back-and-forth emails with HR to kick off this messy process—or even the mile-long checklist buried in an onboarding doc. Too often, requests get lost, and key steps get missed, leaving new hires without proper accounts and equipment on day one. 

With Rippling, onboarding hassles disappear through intelligent automation triggered directly from the core employee record in the user directory. You can build customer policies based on any user attribute to define who gets what devices, apps, and permissions.

Real-world example: Let's say you hire a new VP of Marketing based in Chicago. You could set up rules to automatically:

• Order a pre-configured MacBook Air laptop with all required marketing software installed.
• Create their corporate email account and provision access to cloud apps like Salesforce, Asana, Zoom, and Slack, including adding them to the right marketing teams and channels.
• Grant role-based access controls and security policies based on their job function, such as multi-factor authentication requirements.
• Transfer any required data access and send policy documents for e-signature.

With Rippling, the onboarding flow is unified. Documents and agreements are sent out automatically. And the stressful game of telephone between IT and HR is eliminated. Instead, streamlined workflows handle everything from device allocation to account provisioning, all in one place.

Automate the full employee lifecycle  

The IT workload doesn't stop at onboarding. Every transition, including promotions, location changes, employee type updates, etc., requires account and permission updates. Rippling replaces manual requests by letting you automate these processes.

With Rippling's powerful workflow automation, you can design custom logic to update any employee record, provision the right app accounts, and reassign devices and licenses when any core dataset changes. 

Workflows utilize Supergroups to group employees and devices based on data points such as department, title, geo, manager, tenure, device, and applications. Tweaking an attribute automatically triggers intelligent downstream updates across your infrastructure. 

Real-world example: If an employee transitions to the engineering team, you can automatically:

• Update their role.
• Upgrade their system.
• Suspend their Salesforce license.
• Provision accounts for developer tools like GitHub and more.

This same automation framework trivially handles the challenging offboarding process whenever someone leaves. Rippling automatically suspends accounts, wipes devices, transfers data ownership, and revokes access with one click, according to your policies.

Not only does Rippling automate tedious tasks, but it's also engineered to meet the strictest enterprise security and compliance standards. By obtaining certifications such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27018, and CSA STAR Level 2, Rippling demonstrates its dedication to maintaining robust security measures and upholding industry-leading standards.

We don’t treat compliance as a box to check off. Rather, we make sure it’s deeply ingrained in everything we do at Rippling. We aim for what we call “meaningful compliance,” security controls that actually impact the security of our environment and, ultimately, our customers’ data.

Streamline inventory and device management

You can select and ship pre-owned and new devices through Rippling, but the addition of Inventory Management simplifies retrieving and storing devices as well.  

When you assign a new device, it can be shipped directly to the employee's doorstep. Alternatively, companies can choose from a range of new devices tailored to specific departmental needs, all available through Rippling.

Selecting a device is highly customizable.  From the settings, you can configure the options available in the hiring flow. You can also configure approvals, so if the HR admin selects the device, an IT person can sign off on it before it goes into effect.

Once you select the device, the checkout process is simple. Because the employee’s address is already in the system, you avoid any last-minute shipping hassles. Rippling's automation ensures that the correct device arrives on time, complete with the required specifications and software. 

Every device you purchase through Rippling comes with a pre-installed device agent, ensuring the right policies and necessary desktop applications, such as Chrome and Slack, are ready on the first day.

Once accounts and devices are provisioned, Rippling gives IT teams control over maintaining policy-compliant devices throughout an employee's career. 

Through Device Management, you can easily pre-configure and automatically deploy security policies on devices, enforce disk encryption, password rules, OS updates, and more. You can also:  

• View detailed device inventory and installed software
• Remotely manage devices (wipe, lock, transfer ownership, etc.)
• Deploy any software package and automate patching/updates
• Gain visibility into antivirus and threat monitoring
• Warehouse pre-owned devices for reassignment

Unify IT operations in one platform

The onboarding, device management, and automation workflows above are just the start of Rippling's unified IT platform. 

Rippling combines natively-built IT apps like Identity & Access Management (IAM), Mobile Device Management (MDM), Inventory Management, and more into one suite on top of your centralized workforce data. In the past, managing all of these capabilities meant stitching together disparate point solutions with separate directories, admin systems, support motions, and data models. 

But with Rippling's complete native IT suite integrated with your employee data in one platform, IT has one true "pane of glass" for administration across your environment. Everything is centralized and consistent without fragmentation. Watch our latest webinar recording to see Rippling IT in action.