If you depend on third-parties outside of your business to help generate revenue, your partners are just as critical a part of your business success as your own employees. Depending on your industry and exact business model, your “partners” may include resellers, agents, brokers, physicians, or other professionals in your B2B interaction.
Many companies digitized their business collaboration and created online partner portals and other digital partner collaboration platforms But in order for your partners to be able to effectively collaborate with you using those platforms and drive sales, you need an efficient, reliable and scalable way to manage the identities of your partners and control which resources within your business they can access.
There are many solutions available to help manage external users, but not all external users are the same. For managing partners’ identities there’s a need for a B2B Access Management (Otherwise known as Partner Identity and Access Management, PIAM or B2B IAM) solution. B2B Access Management tools save your business time and reduce the risk of costly disruptions (like a partner’s inability to access a resource needed to close a sale) by streamlining and automating the management of partner identities.
Manage partners as complete organizations, not just individual users.
There are actions, policies, and decisions that relate to the organization as a whole, and the B2B Access Management solution must allow you to execute those functions at that level. For example, making additional content available and distributing it across your partner community (rather than across all individual users), or suspend a partner and revoke all of his users’ access as a result of the action taken on the organization entity.
Delegate access admin capabilities to individual members within their organizations.
The delegated admin at the partner company has the ability to invite, remove, or suspend and manage the access of their own users to your partner portal . This shifts the burden and expense of managing third-party users away from your company.
Gain visibility into and control over which business resources your partners can
access – as an organization and also at the individual user level
Assign and distribute access rights smoothly and efficiently, even if you are working with dozens or hundreds of partner organizations, with a total of thousands of individual employees at one time.
Partners themselves benefit from B2B Access Management solutions, too. When designed properly, B2B Access Management tools give partners the ability to manage their own users’ access rights, suspend or remove users as their own employees come and go, and easily provide them in-house support. B2B Access Management solutions should be designed to let partners master those admin capabilities without requiring special technical expertise on their part; they should not have to write configuration code or navigate arcane interfaces to manage their own roles.
To date, with no adequate B2B Access Management/PIAM solution available in the marketplace, managing partners’ users’ access rights has been a disjointed, decentralized headache for most organizations. The difficulty stems from having to manage the identities of people who don’t work for you directly.
Instead of having a consolidated platform that can support the end-to-end process of managing any and all partners’ identities and access rights to your partner portal, organizations rely on a mishmash of different tools, including bespoke solutions that have to be created and maintained by their IT teams. These tools are hard for partners to use, resulting in poor partner experience, they siphon valuable IT resources from your organization and they make it difficult to add new partners easily. On top of this, they are poorly suited for supporting the rollout of new types of services that require access control rights.Finally, because of a lack of visibility into who has access to what, and who is using what, companies have a security issue, as well as the inability to truly know if their partners are finding success in their partnership or not.
Because of the lack of centralization, it’s difficult to introduce new services within a framework. Your IT team needs to build a new set of policies to govern the new service, or figure out a way to integrate existing policies with the service. Either way, it’s a slow, time-consuming, money-wasting process.
You lack visibility into access permissions. When partner organizations are treated as ordinary users, it’s hard to track the access rights of specific users and know exactly who has permission to do what. Your system may be full of users that should no longer have access, because they’ve changed employment or moved on, but still have access permissions in your portal. This is a major security and compliance issue, which poses a critical risk to the business.
The system is unwieldy for partners to use and doesn’t let them make necessary changes on a self-service basis. As a result, your partners may ignore the system, which makes it harder for you to coordinate with them. Even worse, they choose not to work with you at all because they can’t efficiently access the resources they need to do business.
You’re not gathering all the data you could be, and therefore you’re missing out on valuable business insights. A fully developed PIAM system would allow you to gather information on how many users your partner has, how active they are, and what features of your platform each individual accesses most.
PlainID partner manager revolutionizes B2B Access Management by introducing a solution that is designed to fully integrate the Partner and their needs into the IAM solution. Instead of relying on a decentralized array of bespoke tools and disjointed steps to try to manage partner roles and access rights, PlainID Partner Manager models partners’ access rights management on the business relationship.
Using this structure, Partner Manager provides a, two-tiered process for managing partners that is founded on the concept of a delegated model.
Your responsibility is to create the access roles (and update them as new services are introduced) that define how individual members of the partner organization can access your company’s resources.
You also approve new partner registration requests, and onboard them. Partner Manager keeps track of new partner requests and allows you to approve and manage them centrally through the PlainID console.
In this way, Partner Manager puts you in control of what your partners can and can’t do, using granular access roles . It also provides complete visibility into partner access rights so that you’ll always know who can do what. And it allows you to update roles at any time if you need to change partner access rights.
Your partners enjoy a self-service B2B solution that allows them to add and manage new users with ease. They’ll receive delegated administrative consoles for managing their own users’ access, adding more users for their organization and so on.
This means your partners can manage their own internal users while remaining within the bounds of access policies you define. You don’t need to worry about the tedium of managing each individual user within partner organizations, but you still get the assurance that your access controls will be enforced.
PlainID Partner Identity and Access Manager’s unique delegated responsibility model provides a process of continuous revenue growth:
PlainID Partner Identity and Access Manager provides your partners with a simple, self-service solution that makes it easy for them to work with your company.
The simple approval process and self-service user-management features in Partner Manager ensure that your partners can get quick access to the resources they need to drive sales, exactly when they need them. At the same time, control over their users’ permissions allows hem to manage and update their own employees’ access rights continuously.
And the easy-to-use interface for the delegated admin console ensures that your partners don’t need to assign IT specialists to handle their access rights. Anyone can work with the tool.
To put it simply, Partner Manager allows your partners to manage their access rights in-house, in an efficient and convenient way. That makes your partners happy and more productive — which in turn drives business success. Happy, successful partners who can easily access the resources they need help you sell more.
Businesses across a wide range of industries and verticals can benefit from the efficiency of Partner Manager PIAM solution.
In manufacturing, managing partner relationships is critical for keeping the supply chain well-oiled, as well as moving products to vendors. A partner’s inability to access your own systems could lead to problems like shipping delays, materials delivered to the wrong site or even the wholesale cancellation of supply deliveries.
Likewise, being able to ship and sell manufactured goods requires reliable coordination with partners who help you sell your products.
Partner Manager ensures that all of these relationships are smoothly managed. Give each supplier and each sales partner the right level of access to keep manufacturing operations running smoothly.
Insurance companies interface with a variety of partners: Other insurers, insurance agencies, brokers, service providers, financial services firms and many more.
In order to keep processes like issuing new premiums, claims management and billing running smoothly, it’s critical for all partners to have the right level of access to insurance systems. You don’t want a claim to go unprocessed because a partner couldn’t provide necessary information, or lose out on a sale because a broker couldn’t finalize a policy in your system
PIAM through Partner Manager gives all partners the right level of access. It also helps mitigate security risks that could arise when partners’ access rights are too broad — a particular risk in the insurance industry, where data is tightly regulated.
Similar to insurance, any financial product such as mortgages and investment products that uses brokers or agents as intermediaries between the parent company and the consumer, requires a reliable identity management system in order to maintain compliance.
Pharmaceutical design and manufacturing requires coordination between a variety of organizations, such as researchers, funding providers, healthcare providers and pharmacies. It’s also an industry where data privacy and security are paramount, so having the ability to investigate activities is a business imperative.
Use Partner Manager to meet the needs of all these industries by allowing partners to self-manage access rights seamlessly, while also granularly controlling who can view what and maintaining continuous visibility into access rights. See an infographic on its ROI.
Partner Manager is a unique solution that introduces a first of a kind B2B Access Management solution that makes the management of partners’ access rights easier and more efficient than any system you’ve used before. To learn more and see the tool in action, contact us to request a Partner Manager demo.