All IDfunction or what?

A small village dairy farm, founded in 1896 in Aretsried, Bavaria, has become a globally active company: Innovative product policies, high quality standards and clever marketing have made the Theo Müller Group a force to be reckoned with in the food industry. And when the little hunger comes, for flexible digital identities, the group relies on products and strategies from evolutionID.

The trendy and popular dairy products from Müller are now produced at 19 locations around the world. More than 26,000 employees currently generate annual sales of around 5.9 billion euros. The production facilities run around the clock, 365 days a year. At the Leppersdorf site alone, five million liters of milk are processed every day.

“The Theo Müller group of companies has grown at an enormous pace in recent years – also through acquisitions,” explains Hendrik Grempe , Head of Real Estate & Business Services at the Theo Müller group of companies. “This led in part to a rather heterogeneous IT infrastructure, which now also needed an update in terms of security,” says Hendrik Grempe, “in the process, the entire handling must become simpler, more secure and more cost-saving.”

Through its existing partnership with Bosch Energy and Building Solutions, the company contacted evolutionID for an in-depth consultation cycle to see the benefits of a centralized digital identity management system.

“Production interruptions due to an EDP changeover are out of the question for us,” clarifies the Theo Müller group of companies. A rollout during ongoing operations was therefore an important part of the specifications. The two sites in Leppersdorf (3,500 employees) and Aretsried (1,500 employees) were the first to be converted to the new security ID cards.

The software basis for this is an evolutionID server at the Leppersdorf site. The flexible ID management system obtains employee master data from the SAP infrastructure and enriches it with information and authorizations. This creates a digital identity for every employee, which now supplies all other security-relevant systems as a central instance. IDfunction manages access authorizations, time and attendance data, secure print features, and payment information for the company cafeteria, for example. If a badge is lost or an employee leaves the company, all authorizations can be cancelled with just one mouse click.

The system works with an ergonomic web interface and is therefore largely independent of client devices. Administrative and production workstations at remote sites access the central database. Here, not only data is entered, but also personal images are taken and the new RFID badges are printed and configured. The system relies on modern multi-standard transponders that work equally well with readers that have already been renewed and those that are still in use. More than 6,000 of the new ID cards are now in use without a hitch.

“Both the system and the service provider evolutionID have proven that the concept is viable and implementable,” praises the project team, “Step by step, we will convert all sites to the new centralized digital identity.”

Further enhancements for the ID management system IDfunction are planned for the future. “In the future, employees will be able to use their employee ID cards to access many services, including machine control,” says Mr. Grempe, “but of course only if they are trained and authorized to do so. This is how we guarantee maximum security standards – for our products and for our employees!”