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Case study

Taking silicon to the cloud

Siltronic now has a resilient and future-ready hybrid-cloud infrastructure supported by transparent, outcome-based management services.

5-minute read

Call for change

Siltronic stands alone

As one of the most recognized global leaders in the design and manufacture of hyperpure silicon wafers, Germany-based Siltronic AG occupies a critical position in the global semiconductor supply chain. With the production of every single wafer, a large amount of data is generated throughout Siltronic’s value chain processes. A resilient IT infrastructure backbone as well as modern IT security technologies are crucial for Siltronic.

Siltronic faced a massive undertaking in establishing its standalone IT environment, process landscape and operating model at speed. It needed to manage the carve-out along with major IT transformation activities while maintaining operational efficiency, optimizing IT costs, and cause as little business disruption as possible to its critical manufacturing operations.

Additionally, the IT transformation needed to ensure the company was well prepared to support its future business growth with modern IT capabilities, such as hybrid cloud environment. This included the protection of Siltronic’s intellectual property—arguably the most valuable part of its business—with state-of-the-art security and data protection.

Working with Accenture enabled us to successfully manage the carve out, while at the same time conducting a major IT transformation and migrating to the cloud.

Scott McClure / Program Manager – Siltronic

When tech meets human ingenuity

Complex transformation on Cloud

Siltronic entrusted Accenture with the responsibility for driving and accelerating its entire IT transformation as well as taking over the running of its IT operations. This spanned not only the full breadth of Siltronic’s technology environment, but also establishing new processes, and incident and change management activities.

The first step on this journey to Siltronic’s standalone IT landscape, was to transition IT infrastructure and application services from the parent company: Wacker Chemie AG to Accenture, initially implementing “dual operations” before carefully shifting over to a new standalone 24x7 operating model—this critical step was achieved in just six months.

While the operational handover to Accenture was still underway, the transformation activities were initiated in a series of parallel infrastructure workstreams. The carve-out was a complex transformation program of its own as it incorporated the setup and execution of a range of new technologies for Siltronic—everything from cloud and on-premises infrastructure to networking ecosystems and from application operations to security and service management.

In total, Accenture helped Siltronic migrate 1,000+ servers and 4,000+ items of production equipment to a hybrid cloud environment using Microsoft Azure, enabling 700+ users on Azure virtual desktops.

Numbers

90

The team helped move over 90 enterprise business systems to a new data center and onto Azure. All migrations were executed within planned system downtimes, and without any rollbacks.

20,000

Accenture also migrated over 20,000 devices for approximately 3,900 members of staff to the new IT environment, and 4,000 workplaces to Windows 10, introducing O365 and OneDrive.

6+

Accenture designed a comprehensive set of 6+ centralized and cloud-ready service management processes based on out-of-the box ITIL/ITSM templates which were customized for Siltronic on ServiceNow.

A valuable difference

A high-tech solution for a high-tech business

Siltronic now has a modernized IT environment that is faster, scalable, more resilient, and easier to use. It can leverage best practice monitoring, capacity, and availability management, as well as automated ticket processing and performance analytics by using a state-of-the-art tools stack, including ServiceNow, AgentWorkspace, myWizard and SPLUNK. Thanks to the use of leading applications, infrastructure and IT security services from Accenture, Siltronic also benefits from measured, outcome based, transparent day-to-day IT management.

With its new state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, Siltronic is now also able to focus on strategic business initiatives with a significantly reduced time to market. Additionally, steps have been taken to establish a standard, globally-aligned IT architecture and standardized IT processes across all its locations. That’s not only more efficient, it also makes it easier to automate and innovate with IT in the future.

We needed a partner who could move us to the cloud and roll out new technology without disrupting our manufacturing production line.

Günter Riedhofer / CIO

Optimizing cloud with a hybrid solution

The choice of hybrid cloud means Siltronic gets the best of both worlds—access to the speed, scalability, and innovation of the public cloud and the rigorous data security and low levels of latency in a new on-premises environment. Both solutions are needed for a business like Siltronic’s. For its high-precision silicon wafer manufacturing operations, running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, having the processing power of an on-premises data center is essential. At the same time, using Microsoft Azure means the company can unleash cloud potential through new solutions to support more flexible working.

With Accenture’s help, Siltronic has taken a huge step forward to an innovative IT environment befitting a high-tech manufacturing business.