IBM on assignment at Toyota
OVERVIEW & TARGET AUDIENCE
Role Management is an essential product for Toyota Motor North America's supply chain products, giving control over defining and managing user roles and permissions within Toyota's internal Cube platform.
Spanning all Toyota employees across the supply chain, Role Management simplifies access control, enhances security and improves efficiency — maintaining order and security by defining clear job responsibilities and access permissions.
MY ROLE
Product Designer for the Role Management Platform.
Designed the end-to-end experience of users requesting access, admins approving and revoking access, and the creation and management of roles within applications.
Collaborated with cross-functional teams across 15+ Cube products to align role management patterns and ensure a consistent, intuitive access control experience.
Requesting Access (All cube users)
GOALS
Centralized User Management: Replacing Sailpoint, Role Management becomes the application for managing user access across all Cube products.
Transition to Granular Control: Role Management allows management of access to features within products, adding another level of control.
Organized Visibility into User Access: Organized by Cube Applications, allowing Application Admins to manage users within their application.
CHALLENGES
Enterprise Scalability: Building a system engineered to scale and manage systemic permissions for Toyota's 10,000+ Supply Chain employees.
Addressing Painpoints: Using the centralization of Role Managment as an opportunity to address user painpoints of poor transparancy and slow turnarounds.
Technical Dependencies: Working closely with engineering teams to anticipate anomalies and reduced costly rework by 20%.
PREVIOUS LANDSCAPE PAINPOINTS
Only authorized users can request access for unauthorized users
Too many disorienting actions in the landing page
Users can only request for roles, unclear what features are being requested for within those roles.
Separate process from the Cube platform.
Alignment
Managed the end-to-end user experience across multiple user types while aligning with 15+ teams to maintain consistency across the Cube platform.
Agile
Designed business needs in an iterative agile approach. Translated dense, multi-dimensional access data into a clear, scalable interface for 10,000+ Supply Chain employees.
Quality Testing
Ran hands-on QA testing across development environments, cutting post-release visual bugs by 30%.
I also designed a logo that built upon the client’s existing brand, aligned to Role Management’s purpose, and amplifies its visibility.
This logo design centers a profile icon surrounded by a larger cube, to symbolize users encased in their role.
The yellow-gold color conveys high value, emphasizing how essential role management is to the seamless operation of every product in Cube.
To address user painpoints, I remapped a simpler workflow and utilized Cubes design system to accelerate developers and matches the existing platform design.
Role Management now within the Cube platform and allows any Cube user to request access instead of gatekeeping to certain users. This improves security and accelerates the permissions process.
Made actions clear and consistent, either labeled as an action or a button with the same actionable blue pattern used through the rest of the Cube platform.
Approving Access Requests (Admins)
Enables admins to easily see all requests that needs actioning from them. They're able to click into request for more details or do a bulk action across requests if needed.
User access visibility and management (Admins)
Supports admins in managing user access. Gives them visibility into user roles, requests, departments and regions.
Creation and Management of Roles and Features (Admins)
Supports admins in managing what users are able to request access to. Product owners can also edit this as their features evolve and grow.
Requesting Access (Users)
Allows any users to request access from Cube. They're able to select specific features and permissions of what they need access to rather than all-or-nothing role access.
Continue to iterate on the Role Management experience as new Cube products onboard — expanding the platform's coverage while maintaining consistency across all application admin workflows.
My Impact
Created a centralized access control platform that replaced a fragmented, manual process for Toyota's supply chain. Role Management gives employees clear visibility into their access, reduces admin overhead, and improves security compliance across all Cube Platform products.