Friday 2023-04-21

HELLA kicks-off the journey to create a joint FORVIA IT environment together with Faurecia. In a first step, Microsoft 365 apps such as Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint will be moved to the Faurecia IT location. The project starts with the migration of HELLA’s IT department as a pilot in May; the migration for all other HELLA users will follow step by step in the months after – with some smaller preparations to start already today. The Microsoft 365 migration will be completed in 2024.

“Having two different IT environments makes our daily cooperation just unnecessarily harder. You have to switch to your Faurecia guest account in Teams to chat, call your colleagues or to work together in teams. Also sharing files is complicated as currently we mainly use separate SharePoint locations. So, having one single Microsoft 365 environment will make working together so much easier,” explains Felix Willing, Chief Information Officer at HELLA. “As HELLA has much fewer users and therefore less data to migrate, it is more feasible to migrate HELLA users to the Faurecia IT location,” Willing adds.

In a second step, employee related data that is part of the Active Directory, such as device data and other apps, will be transferred to the new FORVIA IT location as well. This part of the project will start in the second half of this year.

“We have one common vision for the years to come: We want to build one FORVIA IT environment to help our colleagues improve their interaction and break down any existing barriers in their collaboration,” Willing explains. Apart from easier collaboration, users additionally benefit, as updates can be made for all team members at once. Thus, it becomes easier to keep everyone up to date, users also benefit fast from new features and for the IT organization the entire administration processes will become much easier just using one system.

Smooth migration process

“We will do the migration step by step and in a smooth process, so that nobody has to worry about his or her own migration. We will inform everyone individually with detailed information before the migration for that person starts,” Willing says. In the weeks before the migration starts for each user, they will receive several e-mails to be informed thoroughly about the process and its next steps.

Besides that, some general points are valuable to keep in mind until the migration is completed for everyone:

• All data stays accessible, and employees will be able to continue working during the entire migration process.
• M365 migration will happen location by location. Depending on the location size, the migration of all users at a location may take from one day to several days.
• During the entire migration, there will always be a mixture of migrated and non-migrated users at HELLA, so the way such users interact with each other will be different in certain cases. Detailed information on how to work together during that period will follow.