The issue
The German company BASF is the world’s leading chemical company with a product portfolio that ranges from chemicals, plastics, performance products, agricultural products and fine chemicals to crude oil and natural gas. In light of rapid growth experienced by BASF’s Brazilian subsidiary, management there had an urgent systems security need. Growth had led to a proliferation of management and sales information system users. This increases the chance that unauthorized users might get access to the system. The solution? Hire PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) Brazil to design a more robust identity management process.
Our approach
For the PwC project team, rationalising the client’s identity management protocols represented a complex task. Project manager, Viviane Oliveira, explains: “We had to understand the present system access and align transactions with the system to different functional areas. This enabled us to create a new framework for system access that matched BASF’s specific profile requirements and the appropriate parts of the system for their role.”
The outcome
PwC’s solution: A new identity management process codenamed Cerbero, is in pilot across BASF’s Brazilian operation,. As the pilot draws to a close, the process is expected to be rolled out across ten South American countries. Vera Marques, BASF’s IT director for South America, says that thanks to PwC, she can protect her business more effectively, with fewer resources. “We needed an adviser with world-class audit skills to instruct us to segregate functions and control user profiles. In addition the technical expertise and experience help us in automate the new processes,” she says. “PwC had both the right audit skills and technical knowledge, enabling it to deliver precisely the solution we needed.”
