Case Study: John Lewis Partnership achieves secure, scalable single sign-on and self-service access for 85,000 employees with Oracle

John Lewis Ensures Secure Identity and Access Management, Delivering Streamlined Authentication and Self-Service Support for 80,000 Users

John Lewis Partnership, a major UK retailer and worker-owned business with 85,000 partner-employees across 30 John Lewis stores, 302 Waitrose supermarkets and large online operations, faced a need to simplify and secure access to its Oracle E-Business Suite and WebCenter HR portal. The organization sought to eliminate heavy administrative overhead for onboarding, offboarding and password resets in a high-churn retail environment, enforce data-governance and password policies, and deliver self-service HR functionality to the entire user base without adding more passwords.

Working with Hitachi Consulting, John Lewis deployed Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Identity Manager to build a centralized, role-based single sign-on and identity-management framework. The solution delivered SSO to 80,000 users (initially 15,000 managers and HR/finance staff, then the remaining 65,000), self-service password reset and automated 90-day password prompts, near-instant provisioning/deprovisioning for seasonal hires, improved remote access, and significantly reduced helpdesk overhead while enabling scalable rollout of additional HR services.

John Lewis Partnership

Phil Stonehewer

Technical Lead, Personnel Transformation Program, Business Service Center