When Receptum moved its customers’ environments from Active Directory to management based on Microsoft Entra ID and Intune, the same baseline settings had to be deployed across hundreds of separate customer tenants. With Plentics Tenant Management, the time needed to deploy settings and policies to a single tenant fell from around 50 minutes to just 5 minutes. Today, the same centralized approach also helps Receptum develop and standardize these environments after deployment.
Receptum is a Finnish technology company that provides software, IT solutions, and development and transformation projects. The company is particularly known for combining technical expertise with an understanding of the pharmacy sector.
550 customer environments — too much manual repetition
Receptum’s modernisation project covered 550 customer environments. Moving from AD-based management to Microsoft Entra ID and Intune raised a practical question: how could the same configurations be deployed across hundreds of separate environments without repeating the same steps manually in each one?
The project began with a manual approach. Tenant settings were configured by hand, while Microsoft Lighthouse was used to deploy policies. However, Receptum’s process still required substantial tenant-by-tenant work for preparation and configuration deployment.
The workload was manageable for an individual environment, but repeating it across hundreds of environments created a significant resourcing challenge. Repetitive manual work also increased the risk of human error.
According to Andreas Lindholm, IT Lead at Receptum, the ability to perform the necessary configuration tasks in bulk was the deciding factor in choosing Plentics. The aim was not only to accelerate the project but also to simplify ongoing tenant management.
The same configuration across multiple tenants at once
Receptum had already prepared a shared configuration baseline for Lighthouse. When adopting Plentics, there was no need to redesign it: the existing configurations could be transferred for use in Plentics.
Receptum reduced the initial preparation work with its own PowerShell script. Plentics Tenant Management then enabled configurations to be deployed to multiple customer tenants at once.
According to Juha Pekkonen, deploying settings and policies to a single tenant had previously taken around 50 minutes. With the new approach, the same work took around five minutes.
“Deploying the settings and policies to a single customer tenant took only around five minutes. We could also deploy the same configurations to multiple customer tenants in bulk, saving even more time.”
–Juha Pekkonen, System Specialist, Receptum
The estimated saving is 45 minutes per tenant, representing an approximately 90% reduction in the time required for configuration.
Across the full 550-tenant project, this would equate to a calculated saving of approximately 412,5 hours of configuration work.
This calculation is based on Receptum’s estimated configuration times of 50 minutes per tenant before and five minutes with Plentics. It illustrates the savings at a scale of 550 tenants.
Nearly 500 tenants provisioned by one person
Centralised configuration also made a difference to project delivery. According to Lindholm, Receptum was able to provision nearly 500 tenants in around six months, with one person handling the work.
“With Plentics, we were able to provision almost 500 tenants in around six months, with one person handling the work.”
–Andreas Lindholm, IT Lead, Receptum
Plentics’ impact therefore extended beyond making an individual task faster. A repeatable configuration approach enabled Receptum to move a large-scale rollout forward without having to deploy each setting separately to every customer environment.
One change in the template tenant, deployed to multiple customers
Deployment is only the first stage in a customer environment’s lifecycle. Settings then need updating, security policies need refining, and customer-specific requirements need to be addressed.
In Receptum’s new approach, a shared configuration change is first made to the baseline in the template tenant. The updated configuration can then be deployed to selected customer tenants through Plentics. According to Pekkonen, deployment to hundreds of tenants takes just a few minutes, rather than requiring the same change to be made manually in each environment.
One practical example is extending the screensaver or screen lock timeout in customer environments. According to Sami Tiainen, Information Technology Infrastructure Specialist at Receptum, deploying changes like these across the customer base requires only a few clicks with Plentics. Previously, simply switching between customer-specific management portals could have taken days of work.
Centralised management also proved useful during the project when certain policies were tightened. The first tenants deployed still had the original configurations. Receptum brought these tenants under Plentics management and centrally deployed the updated settings and policies.
The shared baseline could therefore be used both for new deployments and to standardise environments that had already been deployed.
What does a single change mean across 550 tenants?
A simple calculation illustrates the scale of ongoing management. If making one shared configuration change manually took five minutes per tenant, repeating that change across 550 tenants would require nearly 46 hours of work.
With Plentics, the approach is different: the change is prepared in the shared baseline and deployed centrally to all or selected customer environments—by a few clicks.
Planning, testing, and validating the results still require work, but substantial time can be saved on routine tasks.
Time freed up for service development
Receptum’s approach to ongoing management is still in its early stages, but the gains achieved during deployment have already demonstrated the benefits of multitenant management.
According to Lindholm, the capacity freed up from routine management is being used for development tasks that require more planning. Instead of repeating the same operations, specialists can focus on how settings should be configured and how the environments should evolve.
Evaluating security settings against industry best practices continues beyond the rollout project. For a provider managing hundreds of Microsoft tenants, the key is being able to put improvements into practice across customer environments without hundreds of separate manual steps.
For Receptum, Plentics delivers value in two stages: first through faster deployment of shared configurations, and then through the ability to maintain them centrally.
“What has particularly impressed us about Plentics is the speed of product development. We have suggested several improvements, and they have been implemented in the product quickly. This has given us a strong sense that Plentics listens to its customers.”
–Sami Tiainen, Information Technology Infrastructure Specialist, Receptum
Receptum has also valued the pace of Plentics’ product development and its flexibility in responding to their needs. According to Tiainen, improvements requested by Receptum have been introduced into Plentics quickly, reinforcing the sense that Plentics listens to its customers and develops its product around practical needs.
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