European white goods manufacturer makes logins secure and effortless for staff and customers

Can you fall in love with your refrigerator? Grow attached to your microwave? Develop feelings for your coffee machine? For Turkey’s Lovemarks Awards, the answer is absolutely. That’s why each year, backed by market research giant Ipsos, the initiative honours the brands consumers love most.

In the household appliances category, one brand has held on to the Lovemarks Award for 11 years: Arçelik. Founded in Istanbul in 1955, the manufacturer of washing machines and other large household appliances, as well as consumer electronics, has become a household name by delivering quality products at affordable prices. Today, 15 out of Turkey’s 17 million households own at least one Arçelik-made product.

But love has many languages, and beyond Turkey, Arçelik is known by many names. Households in more than 140 countries experience Arçelik through 12 brands (Arçelik, Beko, Grundig, Blomberg, ElektraBregenz, Arctic, Leisure, Flavel, Defy, Altus, Dawlance, and Voltas Beko). In the UK, one in five kitchen appliances sold comes from Arçelik-owned Beko. As Europe’s second largest white goods company according to market share ranking based on quantity, Arçelik reached a consolidated turnover of 5 billion Euros in 2019.

Bringing these products to life are over 30,000 employees in 23 production facilities in 9 countries, sales and marketing offices in 34 countries, 1,600 researchers in 15 R&D and Design Centres in Turkey and R&D Offices across five countries. In fact, with almost 70% of its revenues coming from international markets, Arçelik is the R&D leader in Turkey, holding more than 3,000 international patent applications to date.

But for Arçelik’s IT team, managing a vast B2B and B2E user base, as well as 106,000 B2C customer accounts, has long been a challenge. “On our internal platforms, we constantly need to authenticate a variety of user groups, who used to log in to our services through many different solutions,” remembers Adnan Sancak, IT Solutions and Services Manager at Arçelik. “As we started adopting cloud applications, that setup reached its limits, holding us back with constant implementation issues.”

Today, Arçelik has solved that problem by moving from its legacy on-premises identity solutions to Okta. Staying true to itself as Turkey’s most beloved household brand, it was Arçelik’s dedication to customer experience that inspired this change.

A single “household” for all user identities

Back in 2017, Arçelik had no automated identity access management solution in place to handle B2C customers. Instead, users were managed in B2C applications locally, resulting in several customer-facing channels, which left questions for customers around which channel was the most up-to-date, or which one was meant for them. Without a centralised directory, IT staff had to manage user accounts manually. And new, in-demand features, such as social logins, had to be put in place separately across different applications, or weren’t supported at all.

To improve the customer experience, Arçelik introduced a digitalisation strategy in 2017, merging the disparate customer channels in an omni-channel solution. That’s when Adnan and his team realised that the perfect identity and access management (IAM) tool wouldn’t just revamp the customer journey, but improve the user experience for employees and partners as well. “What we needed most was a single directory to manage all of our B2B, B2C, and B2E users, to simplify the user experience and reduce the workload on IT,” says Adnan.

In selecting an IAM provider, Arçelik had three primary requirements: compatibility, availability, and security. With the omni-channel strategy on its way, compatibility with the new cloud applications was the most pressing issue. Arçelik was introducing new software, including SAP Hybris for the new, centralised B2C platform, as well as Salesforce, MuleSoft, and SuccessFactors.

“With our existing on-premises identity solution, we couldn’t implement most of the cloud applications we needed because they simply weren’t supported,” says Adnan. “Okta had predefined connectors for every single app we’re working with and supported social logins with providers like Facebook, which was a huge plus.”

Beyond flexibility, Okta’s reputation for 99.99% uptime, unlimited scalability, and a strong foundation for compliance with regulatory frameworks sealed the deal. “After evaluating at all the possible alternatives, Okta stood out as the most flexible, stable, and secure solution for Arçelik.”

Frictionless logins for a seamless shopping experience

As part of the omni-channel revamp, Arçelik streamlined its B2C operations with a unified customer platform running on SAP Hybris. Once logged in, customers get additional features with the integrated Salesforce Community Portal, which would normally require another login page. “With Okta’s Single Sign-On capability, we can give our customers access to all the features of our customer portal with a single login,” says Adnan. “And if we want to extend the functionality for our e-commerce website even further, we can always add new applications.”

Today, Okta runs the entire password-management workflow, from the initial registration to resets. While the login UI is maintained by SAP Hybris, Okta is integrated via API, managing all other processes. For customers, this makes for easier shopping. They can register in seconds with Facebook and Google, and 106,000 users have done so already. Once logged in with Single Sign-On, visitors get more functionality than ever before. Beyond more information about the products, they can leave comments or rate their purchases, all within the central Arçelik interface.

Happy with the success of the Okta-enhanced customer portal, Adnan and his team moved on to roll out IAM solutions across its infrastructure. On the workforce side, they first integrated Single Sign-on and Universal Directory to finally manage all B2B, B2C, and B2E users in one place.

Empowering employees with simple, secure app access

First, Arçelik integrated its IT Service Management solution ServiceNow with the new Single Sign-on interface. The deployment was quick and simple, says Adnan:  “It was a matter of hours for us to apply Single Sign-on to our IT Service Management solution and provision all the users. Today, the application is used by 6,000 employees every month, and it’s been running like clockwork for three years. And our experience with other applications has been pretty much the same.”

Because Okta integrates with Active Directory (AD), employees could log in to the new Single Sign-on interface with their existing AD credentials, which made the transition seamless. Today, more than 80 applications are connected to Okta, and if Arçelik’s employees have any say, that number will continue to grow. “Once we started adding the first applications to Okta Single Sign-on, people quickly asked for more, because it’s so convenient to log in just once and gain access to all our apps,” says Adnan. “From both users and IT, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Now that employees have more control over their logins, Arçelik’s IT staff spends less time on help desk tickets and onboarding tasks, leaving more time for value generating work.

By enabling employees to access to Arçelik’s work applications on any device, from anywhere, Okta boosted the company’s productivity even as much of the working world came to a halt. When COVID-19 called for a shift to working from home, the company’s VPN, which gives employees access to critical on-premises services, became one of the most important applications overnight. And overnight, Arçelik gave employees access to the company’s Cisco VPN with Okta, enabling them to work securely from home.

There’s one more user group whose management Okta helped streamline: more than 40,000 B2B customers, including retailers, distributors, and technicians, need access to Arçelik’s applications. The problem? All of them use different portals to log in. With Okta’s prebuilt LDAP integration, Arçelik connected each of those portal applications to Okta without interruption, creating users with SAML while migrating in existing passwords. “Our B2B customers didn’t even notice the difference, it was a seamless change for them,” says Adnan. “Sometimes, the best benefits are the simplest.”

Stronger security at a lower effort

To combine simplicity with security, Arçelik started rolling out Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication in 2020, using Okta Verify and other authentication options like SMS. “There’s no shortage of fraudulent attacks in our industry, and sometimes, people fall into traps, such as phishing emails,” explains Adnan. “With Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication, we can strengthen our security without sacrificing ease of use.”

The first application to be integrated with multi-factor authentication was Arçelik’s VPN. By adding this additional security layer, Adnan and his team protect customer data by making sure that only authorised employees gain access to the company’s internal resources. “With the guidance of our Customer Success manager, we completed the entire enrolment phase for 5,000 employees within a week,” he says. “The transition was incredibly smooth.”

While rolling out multi-factor authentication to the rest of its global workforce remains the top priority, Arçelik’s plans with Okta are just beginning. There’s constant employee movement between the company’s branches and offices, and working with contractors means user identities are sometimes short-lived or need to be extended manually. “We want to implement Lifecycle Management to automate onboarding and offboarding further and streamline the user workflow,” says Adnan.

Working closely with their customer success manager at Okta empowers Adnan and his team to make more informed strategic decisions for every new solution they adopt. This direct line to the IAM forefront enables Arçelik to implement innovative technology early, accelerating benefits for customers and employees. “In monthly meetings and regular talks with our customer success manager, we learn about new trends, solutions, and developments,” says Adnan. “They’ve really helped us achieve our strategic vision, and it’s been a great experience.”

There’s no Lovemarks Award for the smoothest login experience, but Arçelik continues to optimise the user journey by removing friction from each step. Now, Adnan and his team want to enable users to ditch passwords altogether: “We hope to be among the first to use Okta’s new Passwordless Authentication features. Getting to experience these emerging technologies first is just one of the many benefits we experience in our partnership with Okta.”