The project team showed full commitment and it quickly became clear that the legacy Lotus Notes system, which had grown over the years, was no longer up to the high demands of a central cloud platform in the long term. Especially as the documents, applications and workflows stored in the Lotus Notes databases were not uniformly maintained and therefore difficult to find. With a product portfolio as differentiated as SMC’s, this was a situation that prompted those responsible to migrate to a new, powerful and efficient IT landscape. In addition, the life cycle for Lotus Notes had come to an end and the end of support was looming.
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Full transparency with Microsoft SharePoint: 700,000 product variants at the touch of a button
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SMC Deutschland GmbH, a leading global manufacturer, partner and solution provider for pneumatic and electrical automation technology, will be using Microsoft SharePoint Online in the future. With over 700,000 product variants successfully marketed by SMC Sales, the company will benefit from a modern, efficient and necessary IT solution based on the modern Microsoft Office 365 cloud platform. At SMC Germany, the focus is always on the optimum customer solution. SMC realizes individual applications in automation technology based on the specific requirements of our customers. These can consist of a variety of standard products or require customized development. Without a modern, central cloud platform on which product information relevant to the offer is quickly and easily available in the required uniformity and can be accessed from there, this high standard could not be achieved.
The starting signal for a challenging project - PTA consultants provide valuable impetus
Project ID: 5250
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A reliable migration partner was therefore needed to carefully analyze all process chains and transfer the old IT landscape to a new, modern target architecture. SMC has now found the right partner in the Mannheim-based management consultancy PTA. The PTA consultants not only know how to successfully carry out migration projects, but also have the necessary process know-how. In the first stage of the project, the project team decided to organize an event-storming session as part of a workshop. A method in the sense of domain-driven design that ensures that all processes and their business events are put to the test, that an actual/target comparison can take place and that their processes can ultimately be modeled efficiently. “This stocktaking was a complete success and the ideas that PTA put forward steered our project in the right direction. The project team was fully focused and took a close look at our process landscape. The analysis and insights that we gained together in this way formed a solid foundation for the subsequent migration to our new platform,” reports Christian Krebs, Expert Digital Business Development at SMC GmbH, on the event storming at SMC.
Looking at individual sub-projects as part of the big picture
After the event storming, it was clear to those involved that the many individual sub-projects, which were available in different ways in Lotus Notes, would be best migrated to a central platform that would provide all documents, information and associated workflows relevant to the offer in a standardized and clear manner. The choice fell on Microsoft SharePoint Online, a component of Microsoft Office 365, which bundles all the information and resources that SMC needs on a cloud platform and compiles them clearly. “In further workshops, the PTA consultants convinced us that it is not advisable to transfer the databases available in Lotus Notes 1:1 to the new target architecture,” says Christian Krebs, describing another valuable insight from the migration project. Instead, based on the results of the event storming, the project team set about iteratively developing individual sub-projects one by one and carefully evaluating the associated processes. This had the advantage that the project team was able to define exactly which product-oriented components were to be extracted from the huge data pool using the migration tool from Lotus Notes and integrated into the new, precisely tailored target architecture in Microsoft SharePoint during the course of the changeover. Unnecessary data ballast could be discarded with this method.
Default settings make work easier and create transparency
Another advantage of the new IT landscape: SMC will use standard workspaces in Microsoft SharePoint and a central search that is easy to handle and manage. Whereas previously the search for certain brochures, product specifications or forms was often tedious and dependent on the experience of the respective specialist departments and their employees, these are now maintained in standardized libraries and can be found reliably at the click of a mouse using the central search function. “With such transparent data management, we are taking our customer relationship management to a new level. The extended document management functions are also a big plus for our colleagues in sales when it comes to data integrity,” says Christian Krebs enthusiastically about the successful migration to Microsoft Office 365.
Next step: Docking external systems
Technical development in most branches of industry is proceeding at a rapid pace and hardly allows any breathing space. Technical components have to become more and more powerful while providing precise, reliable and durable service. SMC has internalized this claim. The broad product range and the almost inexhaustible product variants symbolize SMC’s spirit of always standing up for the optimum customer solution. The new IT infrastructure ideally supports this claim and, with its lean and efficient processes, helps to ensure that quotations are prepared in the shortest possible time and inquiries are answered quickly and in a customer-specific manner. The migration project at SMC was a complete success and follow-up projects are already planned. Together with the PTA consultants, the company is already exploring the extent to which external systems, web applications and outsourced databases can be integrated into the new IT landscape – for example from the European branches or production sites. And the project team is sure that it will build bridges to other sources of information in order to link them to the convenient search function and make them accessible. The integration of valuable information pools into SMC’s central IT system is therefore far from complete. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t exist at SMC. And so it may come as no surprise that the wheels never stand still at SMC.
Customer testimonial
“This stocktaking was a complete success and the ideas that PTA put forward steered our project in the right direction. The project team was fully focused and took a close look at our process landscape. The analysis and insights we gained together in this way formed a solid foundation for the subsequent migration to our new platform.”
Christian Krebs, Expert Digital Business Development at SMC GmbH, on event storming at SMC
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