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Royal Ahrend Modernizes Digital Workplace by Migrating from IBM FileNet to SharePoint Online

Royal Ahrend, a global leader in sustainable commercial furniture, partnered with Proventeq to restructure and migrate content from a complex FileNet system to SharePoint Online—simplifying taxonomy from 29 to 5 content types, enhancing compliance through metadata enrichment and secure libraries, and enabling seamless remote collaboration in a modern Microsoft 365 environment.

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Client Overview

Founded in 1896, Royal Ahrend is an international leader in commercial furniture committed to delivering highly collaborative and sustainable office, learning, healthcare and retail environments to end users around the world.

The Challenge

Royal Ahrend needed to move from its legacy IBM FileNet system into SharePoint Online. The goal was to utilize Microsoft’s advanced functionalities while maintaining their content in a more structured approach.

Bad user experience

User Interfaces (UI) in the legacy ECM are unfriendly and challenging to work with, which created a bad user experience and had a negative impact on efficiency and productivity.

Complex to manage and maintain

Content was stored according to the file types available in the legacy FileNet system. The poor information architecture made it hard to manage and maintain.

Inefficient and high management costs

The metadata in the legacy FileNet platform was either missing or incomplete and needed adding from various sources . This was time consuming and costly to manage.

Compliance and security Issues

Dossier documents were filed in common object stores in FileNet instead of customer-specific locations which created compliance and security issues.

Our Solution

By working closely with the Royal Ahrend’s team, Proventeq were able to restructure their content to a more logical hierarchy in SharePoint Online. This move to Microsoft 365 enabled them to realize their modern digital workplace ambitions and get a secure remote working environment ready for seamless team collaboration.

Discovery & analysis

We used our Content Analyser to understand and identify the existing content landscape in FileNet. We also ran a pilot migration to prove that the revised content architecture worked as per business expectations prior to commencing the full migration.

IA optimization

Using custom classification rules, we consolidated multiple content types from 29 down to 5 in the target SharePoint system, thereby creating a simplified structure.

Security & compliance

During the migration, we enriched and restructured Royal Ahrend’s content via classification, security remapping, metadata and taxonomy. We also moved dossier documents from the common object store to customer specific document libraries to ensure security and compliance.

Full-Fidelity migration

Once the IT team at Royal Ahrend were satisfied with the migration design and target system architecture, Migration Accelerator was utilised to execute a full-fidelity migration with an item-level audit trail. This ensured that all items were successfully migrated.

The Results

The migration to SharePoint Online delivered significant benefits to Royal Ahrend, transforming how they manage their data and helping to reduce costs:

  • Improved user productivity: With the extensive restructuring, rationalisation and enrichment of the various data types, Proventeq were able to align content in a clean and robust way, that both caters for historical data and empowers Royal Ahrend to take advantage of the many benefits that restructuring and re-alignment brings to their data – consolidating their digital workplace.
  • No BAU impact: Allowing for the migration to happen alongside existing business processes was a challenge, which was met due to data load planning and allowed the migrated and centralised data to continue working with full integration into companies’ existing ERP and CRM systems. Going live allowed daily business processes to continue.
  • Reduced costs: Easier but more powerful administration and management coupled with provisions for Data Loss Prevention tIn moving their data away from IBM FileNet, Royal Ahrend were able to make cost savings by decommissioning the legacy system and data held in these disparate locations. This was all achieved in a way which did not impact their day to day business processes.
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Without Proventeq we would never have been able to convert our highly complex historical data into a modern cloud application. “

Gijs Boudens - ICT Director, Royal Ahrend

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ClientRoyal Ahrend
SectorManufacturing
OfferingMigration from IBM FileNet to SharePoint Online