Case Study
A call for cloud
A Large Specialty Products Manufacturer transformed workplace collaboration by switching to Microsoft Teams.
Call for change
The need for speed and agility
Modern manufacturing businesses rely on frequent collaborative innovation to develop next-generation products and services for their customers. However, as legacy telephony systems, communication platforms and file-sharing technologies age, companies find themselves with a fragmented and disconnected environment involving multiple providers. That can hinder their ability to collaborate with the pace and agility required.
This was the situation facing one multinational manufacturing company based in North America. It was using a variety of technologies and platforms, including an Avaya telephony system and WebEx to meet its communication and collaboration needs. This fragmented legacy setup was becoming increasingly burdensome.
The company recognized a more modern approach was needed. The goal? To centralize its collaboration platforms, providing a single platform for communication, collaboration, and document sharing across the business—from any device and from any location.
When tech meets human ingenuity
It takes Teams
Accenture’s longstanding partnership with the company, and our unique ability to support the program end to end, meant we were ideally placed to help. In fact, we’d already been instrumental in helping the company map out its broader cloud transformation to Microsoft Office 365. That effort included a detailed assessment of the company’s existing technology environment and a series of key recommendations for modernization—including migrating the whole business to Microsoft Teams.
Working closely with the company’s people, we then set about implementing the Teams migration at pace. But this was more than just a technical engagement.
The Accenture team also coordinated numerous other aspects of the program, including project management, change management and communications, and setting up the governance for technical support.
The team also made sure to put employee experience front and center by developing a range of personas based on different user needs. As an advanced manufacturing business, the company had many employees with unique and specialized requirements for their communications technology which needed to be accommodated. These requirements included, for example, portable devices and noise cancelling headsets needed by factory floor workers.
The implementation was phased to ensure the program would deliver value without disruption to the business. We began by enabling virtual calling to provide cross-company communication before migrating Avaya numbers over to Teams in stages by location. The phasing also involved prioritizing users who would get the most from the Teams platform early on. That had the added benefit of creating early-adopter advocates for the program, accelerating take-up among the rest of the business.
Training was an important component. To ensure a smooth transition, the global workforce needed to be upskilled in Teams. Our change champion network ran critical “train the trainer” sessions and created user-friendly guides in multiple languages.
A valuable difference
Cloud-based collaboration at its best
After just four and a half months, the company successfully migrated 90% of its employees to Teams. They now have a modern, unified, cloud-based collaboration and communication platform fit for an agile manufacturing business. What’s more, it was delivered with minimal disruption, including migrating employees’ existing Avaya numbers over to Teams.
The flexibility of the new platform would prove especially critical as the world was thrown into turmoil by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the crisis striking just as implementation began, the team demonstrated agility and adaptiveness in the face of adversity. This meant successfully managing global shortages in headset hardware while accommodating the company’s urgent need to fast-track some of its key people onto Teams.
That included human resources employees, who needed to keep vital recruitment activities going while offices and factories were shut down to contain the pandemic.
Platform achieving multi-million-dollar savings
The new platform is a major success. It’s given this company a modern, flexible, unified, cloud-based collaboration platform that’s paved the way for its continued success, throughout the pandemic and beyond.
90%
employees successfully migrated to Teams
80+%
satisfaction rate among employees
<4.5
months a modern, unified, cloud-based collaboration and communication platform fit for an agile manufacturing business
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