MEKU Group – Global IT architecture

Challenge

The MEKU Group filed for insolvency in 2019 due to general difficulties in the automotive sector. Since several subsidiaries and the management company came with different trustees and administrators, the special challenge was the close connection of the companies by a central IT infrastructure. For this reason the advisors of Sysfacts were constantly in contact with the management and the responsible persons of the responsible law firms.

Since the sale of individual subsidiaries and business divisions was looming, a rapid, secure, but also data protection compliant separation of the relevant applications was necessary. The fact that some infrastructure components, the Active Directory, the Exchange servers and Office 365 were operated as shared resources, made intensive planning and a precise consequence analysis indispensable. Since production continued in all companies, avoiding outages was imperative.

Solution

In the first step, the Sysfacts consultants, in consultation with the management and other external consultants, designed a plan for the infrastructural decoupling of the individual companies. As part of the planning process, the team ran extensive test scenarios in the Sysfacts lab based on snapshots of the existing environment. This enabled everyone involved to better assess and evaluate the consequences of the planned decoupling.

After the consulting team had worked out reliable processes, the engineering department migrated the components assigned to each subsidiary – from user accounts to mailboxes and applications – to a dedicated Active Directory. Sysfacts’ consultants managed these migration processes and the engineers carried them out outside business hours to avoid any impact on operational processes in this tense situation.

When two thirds of the subsidiaries had already been decoupled from the overall environment, the company operating the overall environment also had to file for bankruptcy. This unplanned aggravation led to the fact that Sysfacts had to relocate all remaining components of the former overall environment to the FRA15 data center within a few days to ensure stable continued operation and further decoupling.

After 18 months of work, the team completed decoupling and handing over the last applications to the respective business unit buyers in March 2021.

In this complex project the consultants and technicians of Sysfacts AG proved their integrity, solution orientation and flexibility to a special degree. All insolvency proceedings could benefit from the realization of a flexible solution for the provision of the interim infrastructure so the management, and the insolvency administrators could concentrate on the restructuring of the operations.

Lessons learned

Such extensive insolvency proceedings represent an extreme situation for all parties involved. At first glance, the IT infrastructure does not appear to play important role here. However, if as many jobs as possible are to be preserved, a stable IT infrastructure is necessary and as important as normal operations. Here, quick decisions are required in the cumster’s interest, since responsible contact persons are often unavailable.

In the case of the MEKU group of companies, the operating company for the existing IT infrastructure dropped out during the project, so those responsible needed a quick and, above all, unbureaucratic solution. Through the mixture of consulting and engineering, Sysfacts could show that it can flexibly offer the right solutions, especially in extreme situations.