Weilburger Coatings – An IT Director’s journey to creating a smart workplace

Weilburger Coatings – An IT Director’s journey to creating a smart workplace.

As one of the world’s leading coatings manufacturers, WEILBURGER puts chemistry into practice, with the recipe for solutions and successful products. With their divisions +COATINGS for industrial and consumer goods and +GRAPHICS (special varnishes for the graphics industry), WEILBURGER are systems suppliers, closely involved in customer and procedural processes. And WEILBURGER’s innovative power of coating products now has its very own IT thanks to Bechtle. With a transparent move to Microsoft 365, the company uses parts of the system for modern workplace—making them an attractive employer.

Project details.

Services

Professional Services
Modern Workplace
Cloud

Industry

Manufacturing

Manufacturer

Microsoft

Company size

> 1,500 employees

Challenge.

WEILBURGER produces coating solutions that offer protection, function and design. Globally, and in all industrial branches, they create impressive product advantages that change products for good. With the right coating, that WEILBURGER has been developing for over 100 years, manufacturers can enhance the characteristics and manufacturing processes of their crockery, vehicles, and many other everyday items. More than 1,200 employees across nine production sites and eight sales branches on four continents makes WEILBURGER one of the global leaders in coating production.

The innovative power of the individual products needed to be reflected in the company’s own IT infrastructure. WEILBURGER also wanted to modernise its existing traditional IT, e-mail communication, and collaboration and create a modern workplace for staff. The IT needed to be more flexible, GDPR-compliant, and enable working from home. In this way, WEILBURGER wanted to enhance collaboration with its international partners and become a more attractive employer. The global COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated the transformation.

We wanted to break away from the traditional infrastructure approach and decided on Bechtle to transform our IT with Microsoft 365. Bechtle had a good understanding of our requirements, gave us very personal attention, and developed a concept specially tailored to our requirements. M365 covers all bases and we can keep integrating subsystems—from Teams meetings to self-automated processes.

Fabian Bußweiler, Head of IT, WEILBURGER Coatings GmbH

Solution.

WEILBURGER opted for Microsoft 365 and its subsystems in order to make the transition to the new work tools as smooth as possible for employees. Change Management during the IT shift to Microsoft 365 was especially important for WEILBURGER. Bechtle therefore first held workshops introducing the company to Microsoft Teams and its possibilities. To train the employees, Bechtle used a community concept with multipliers—a champions community with power users within the company that is providing constant training and for any employee to this day. For more intensive support, Bechtle put everything employees needed to know in writing and also posted a video on a SharePoint page. There is also an extensive Q&A section in addition to a use policy by Bechtle. During the transformation, WEILBURGER’s IT department was also able to view the current phases on an internal SharePoint page, meaning they were always involved in the process.

Together with Bechtle, WEILBURGER introduced the employees to Microsoft 365 with a simplified version enabling them to learn in small steps and without having to get used to Microsoft 365 in its entirety. Bechtle closely supported all users, giving them the tools to help themselves, too. In this way, they could train for the new system at their leisure and learn how to collaborate with partners in Asia via Microsoft Teams, among many other things.

Now that Bechtle has introduced Microsoft 365 at WEILBURGER, it will be setting up dedicated user models in the next steps and gradually introducing further subsystems of Microsoft 365. Teams telephony, Microsoft Power apps for automation, and other tailored user concepts for individual departments are planned from 2022.

Business benefits.

Together with Bechtle, WEILBURGER met all its requirements with Microsoft 365, creating an attractive working environment. WEILBURGER integrated Microsoft 365 subsystems gradually, boosting workforce productivity as they went. Employees can now work from anywhere with any device, while maintaining the same high security standings. Working from home and collaborating with international partners are now both very easy. WEILBURGER is now an attractive employer that can offer its staff a cutting edge workplace with the latest technologies and solutions.