ZWILLING J.A. HENCKELS – Cloud transformation

Challenge

ZWILLING J.A. HENCKELS is a traditional company for kitchen and household articles and, as part of the Wehrhahn Group, is now an international market leader.

Due to acquisitions, the global IT infrastructure consisted of various isolated solutions and completely different operating concepts. The spectrum ranged from single-user solutions to classic on-premise solutions based on Microsoft to completely cloud-native constructions.

The requirement of the executive board and the internal IT management was a globally integrated and standardized solution based on Microsoft 365 and Azure, but including the applications hosted in the company’s own data center, such as SAP and production-related systems.

Solution

Because of the enormous extent of the interrelated project landscape, the planning was planned on the basis of the use of different service providers in different countries. As general contractor and responsible project manager, Sysfacts acted as the central contact and controlling authority for the customer.

Due to the complexity of the requirement, the project was split into two stages. In the first stage, the mailboxes and operational data of the users in all international locations and subsidiaries are migrated to the central Microsoft 365 client. This will create the state of an internationally and cooperatively usable working environment within a manageable period of time.

Stage 1 – Office 365 and Exchange Online Migration (SaaS)
Sysfacts AG implemented the connection between the local Active Directory, Azure Active Directory and the Office 365 services and built a hybrid Exchange Online infrastructure.
The users’ data and mailboxes were transferred from the old mail systems to Office 365. Since the source environments are very different and a wide variety of mail solutions are used, the migration was designed to run for two years and was successfully completed within this timeframe.

Stage 2 – Harmonization of global IT
The user objects of the worldwide locations had to be transferred to a central AD. The challenge here was also the different source environments and the associated need for harmonization of user information and authorizations. Through individually developed solutions and automatisms, all objects were successfully transferred to the central group environment.

Lessons learned

The source environments, which were completely different in terms of technology and organization, posed a major challenge. This circumstance clearly showed that you have clear advantages with a proven framework, but that individual solutions are still necessary. Due to the development competence of the Sysfacts experts, smart automatisms could be implemented at short notice even in time-critical phases, which is why lengthy purchasing processes were avoided.

The second challenge was the cultural differences in a global IT team consisting of internal and external specialist resources. Not only did the operational communication have to be as clear as possible, but the strategic integration of the sites and subsidiaries and the promotion of acceptance also proved to be extremely important aspects of the overall project.