Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Cleaning Products Company Boosts Employee Productivity with New Collaboration System
Overview
Country or Region: Germany
Industry: Manufacturing
Customer Profile
Freudenberg Household Products is a leader in the household cleaning products market. Its best-known brand is Vileda.
Business Situation
To enhance customer service and keep ahead of the competition, Freudenberg needed to improve communications and collaboration.
Solution
Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Glück & Kanja Consulting installed Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 as the foundation for better communications and collaboration.
Benefits
n Improved mobile communications.
n Enhanced mobility.
n Better performance and reliability.
n Reduced operating costs through server consolidation.
n Increased protection against spam and viruses. / “Installing Exchange Server 2007 and setting up the first 200 accounts was fast, smooth, and problem-free.”
Gert Kautt, IT Director, Freudenberg Household Products
Based in Germany and with subsidiaries in more than 30 countries, Freudenberg Household Products is a worldwide leader in the household cleaning products market. It is best known for its Vileda brand of products. To keep ahead of the competition in the cleaning products market, the company believes it is important to provide excellent collaboration to both internal and external partners. In July 2006, Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Glück & Kanja Consulting started working with Freudenberg to design and implement Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 as part of the Rapid Deployment Program. Through the unified messaging feature—deployed by unified messaging specialist Geomant—Freudenberg employees are now more productive and have faster access to timely and up-to-date information.
Situation
Based in Germany, Freudenberg Household Products is a business division of the Freudenberg Group and a worldwide leader in the household cleaning products market. The company is best known for its brand Vileda, which is made up of a range of cleaning products designed to make daily household work easier. Vileda products are manufactured in China, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States, and the company employs 2,200 people worldwide.
With competition in the cleaning products market increasing, customer relations play a central role in the brand’s ongoing success. Communications and collaboration are not only integral to the Freudenberg team; they’re the future of the business.
Gert Kautt, IT Director, Freudenberg Household Products, says: “Early in 2006, we conducted a project called ComCol—which stands for communication and collaboration— to introduce a highly standardized IT infrastructure worldwide. After four years, we will initiate a second step to further improve collaboration and save management costs.”
Currently, more than 20 messaging servers are installed in different locations around the world. These required expensive and time-consuming remote administration and maintenance contracts. Kautt says: “We wanted to improve our administration processes so we could focus on better serving our customers through efficient collaboration and communication.”
Solution
In July 2006, Kautt accepted an invitation to join the Microsoft® Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) and become one of the first companies to deploy the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging and collaboration solution.
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Glück & Kanja Consulting helped Kautt and his team during all deployment phases. Jan Geisbauer and Marcus Wenz—both project managers at Glück & Kanja—spent a week with Kautt and Carsten Beims detailing all the requirements for the new messaging system and creating a clear migration plan.
Freudenberg used two servers running the Windows Server® 2003 operating system to test the messaging solution. One server acts as the host for the domain controller on which Active Directory® runs, while the second server is dedicated to Exchange Server 2007.
For the initial deployment, Freudenberg created 200 mailbox accounts, with a view to creating up to 1,600 accounts for the final deployment. Kautt says: “Installing Exchange Server 2007 and setting up the first 200 accounts was fast, smooth, and problem-free. From this, I anticipate a fast, smooth migration from our current Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 to the latest generation messaging system.”
To enable integration of Exchange Unified Messaging with the customer’s existing Alcatel OmniPCX 4400, Freudenberg worked with unified messaging specialist Geomant. Kautt says: “Geomant deployed Exchange Unified Messaging with our existing phone switch in only a few days. We were able to quickly gain greater productivity without requiring a significant upgrade to our voice infrastructure.”
Benefits
Freudenberg employees are already benefiting from Exchange Server 2007 with quicker access to information, while administrators find the system much simpler to maintain.
Increased Productivity Through Unified Messaging
Freudenberg employees are enjoying the new unified messaging feature integrated with Exchange Server 2007. With unified messaging, voicemails are loaded into one inbox for each employee, together with e-mails. This functionality means that employees can listen to all their messages by phone regardless of whether these messages arrived by e-mail or voicemail.
With unified messaging, Freudenberg employees are more productive than before. Workers quickly see their messages in their inboxes and avoid the risk of missing important information. “Customer responsiveness is of the utmost importance to us,” Kautt says. “Now, with unified messaging, we can respond much faster.” Mobile workers also benefit because their e-mail messages are pushed immediately to their phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs) with Exchange ActiveSync® technology.
Unified messaging also ensures organizations can manage their entire messaging infrastructure in one place. The unified messaging feature integrates with the Exchange Server 2007 management tools and underlying infrastructure such as Active Directory® directory services.
Unified messaging interoperates with existing PBX systems, rather than requiring an expensive and disruptive upgrade. “We really wanted to give our users the productivity benefits of unified messaging, but didn’t want to change our whole voice infrastructure,” says Kautt. “In a couple of days, unified messaging was deployed using our existing PBX system.”
Kautt says: “By using Exchange Server 2007, not only can we optimize our communication and collaboration, resulting in more intensive customer proximity, but we can also reduce our operating costs.”
Improved Data Synchronization
Having access to up-to-date and timely information is an essential part of any business. And with Exchange Server 2007, synchronization of data between Exchange Server 2007 and mobile devices is better than ever before.
E-mails, appointment dates, contacts, and tasks at Freudenberg are synchronized at all times through Exchange Server 2007. Employees are no longer dependent on their desktops to gain access to particular files. Instead, they can use their mobile devices, such as PDAs, to access their e-mail messages, tasks, calendar, and contacts information wirelessly. Exchange Server 2007 integrates with ActiveSync, which pushes messages from the server directly to a user’s Windows Mobile® device in real time, with no need for extra software or services.
Robust Server Consolidation Supports Fast Recovery
The new collaboration solution will help to ensure Freudenberg can consolidate 30 servers operating Exchange Server 2000 in different locations worldwide to just four servers. This will significantly cut the costs associated with remote maintenance of server hardware.
Because of the support for clustering, Kautt and his team will be able to create one cluster each consisting of two servers. This safeguards against system failure and provides business continuity so Freudenberg benefits from a distinct server consolidation.
The Cluster Continuous Replication feature in the new solution means the system is now restorable at any point in time. Therefore, the messaging system operates with fewer servers, but with a faster runtime because of the 64-bit architecture. Jan Geisbauer, Project Manager, Glück & Kanj, says: “The whole system has become faster, especially because there are fewer inputs/outputs because of the caching. Disaster recovery is not an issue with Exchange Server 2007.”
Enhanced Security Management
With Exchange Server 2007, administrators at Freudenberg have the flexibility to separate server roles. Administrators can deploy only the features and services necessary on a given server and manage accordingly. This makes Exchange Server 2007 very effective against spam and viruses because it helps the IT team deploy Edge Transport in the perimeter network to manage external e-mails.
Kautt says: “For us, this removed the need for third-party supplier systems for these tasks. Because of server role separation, we only need to install the components that are necessary. Only the services and ports that are actually required are active. This leads to improved protection against spam and viruses.”
Reduced Administration Costs
The new Exchange Management Shell and its use of Microsoft Windows PowerShell technology greatly simplifies administration tasks and makes the messaging system far easier to manage. The clear and intuitive graphic user interface means even the most important settings can be configured quickly and easily.
Users don’t need a complex understanding of syntax or coding to configure the system as manual tasks can be automated. Instead, all the detailed settings can be carried out in the command line in the text-based shell. What’s more, the traceability and documentation of these tasks is exceptionally good.
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx
For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server, go to:
www.microsoft.com/exchange