Royal Ahrend, an international leader in commercial furniture, needed to move from their legacy IBM FileNet system to SharePoint Online to leverage new functionality and features while maintaining their business content related to clients and projects. Their existing system created significant challenges for productivity and compliance.
The legacy document management system presented several critical obstacles:
- Poor User Experience: User interfaces in the legacy ECM were unfriendly and challenging to work with, creating a negative impact on efficiency and productivity.
- Complex Information Architecture: Content was stored according to file types available in the legacy FileNet system, resulting in a poor information architecture that was difficult to manage and maintain.
- Compliance and Security Issues: Dossier documents were filed in common object stores in FileNet instead of customer-specific locations, creating compliance and security concerns.
- Inefficient Metadata Management: The metadata in the legacy FileNet platform was either missing or incomplete and needed to be added from various sources, making the process time-consuming and costly to manage.
To meet Royal Ahrend’s specific SharePoint migration requirements, Proventeq worked closely with their existing business processes and underlying systems, utilising advanced features of their Migration Accelerator product:
- Discovery & Analysis: Proventeq used their Content Analyser to understand and identify the existing content landscape in FileNet, creating a foundation for the migration strategy.
- Information Architecture Optimization: Using custom classification rules, Proventeq consolidated multiple content types from 29 down to 5 in the target SharePoint system, creating a simplified structure.
- Security and Compliance Enhancements: During the migration, content was enriched and restructured via classification, security remapping, metadata, and taxonomy. Dossier documents were moved from common object stores to customer-specific document libraries to ensure security and compliance.
- Pilot Migration: A pilot migration was conducted to prove that the revised content architecture worked as per business expectations prior to commencing the full migration.
- Full-Fidelity Migration: Once Royal Ahrend’s IT team was satisfied with the migration design and target system architecture, Migration Accelerator was utilized to execute a full-fidelity migration with an item-level audit trail, ensuring all items were successfully migrated.
“Without Proventeq we would never have been able to convert our highly complex historical data into a modern cloud application.”
Gijs Boudens - ICT Director
The migration to SharePoint Online delivered significant benefits to Royal Ahrend:
- Improved User Experience: With extensive restructuring, rationalization, and enrichment of various data types, content was aligned in a clean and robust way that catered for historical data and empowered Royal Ahrend to take advantage of the benefits that restructuring brings.
- Business Continuity: The migration happened alongside existing business processes without disruption, thanks to careful data load planning. The migrated and centralized data continued working with full integration into the company’s existing ERP and CRM systems.
- Cost Reductions: By moving data away from IBM FileNet, Royal Ahrend achieved cost savings through decommissioning the legacy system and data held in disparate locations, all without impacting day-to-day business processes.
- Secure Remote Working: The move to Microsoft 365 enabled Royal Ahrend to realize its modern digital workplace ambitions and establish a secure remote working environment for active collaboration among departments.
with customer-specific document libraries
types through consolidation
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