Arvesta’s migration to Microsoft 365

About Arvesta

Arvesta is Belgium’s largest full-service partner for farmers and horticulturists, with a strong international network that keeps growing. The company supplies animal feed, agricultural and horticultural goods and services, machinery and flour, and runs 250 Aveve stores and three Eurotuin stores. With more than 120 years of experience and expertise, it advises the agricultural sector on, among other things, smart farming, innovation and sustainable solutions.

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Migration to Microsoft 365 simplifies innovation for Arvesta

Growth company Arvesta uses a buy-and-build strategy, which can be a challenge especially for IT. Successive acquisitions had led to the organisation working with more and more different applications, particularly for internal and external communication. To unify the diverse email infrastructure and improve data protection and partner collaborations, the management team decided to switch to Microsoft 365. The pandemic and a complex cyberattack meant that Project Harmony took longer than expected, but also underlined the importance of change management and digital security. The Flow’s expertise ensured that the migration project ran seamlessly. Now Arvesta wants to focus further on low-code development to achieve even more efficiency gains.

Figures

• Arvesta migrated from a large cloud collaboration suite to Microsoft 365
• All divisions now work with the same software to communicate and share information.
• This improves internal and external collaboration, which simplifies innovation
• 1200: Microsoft 365 accounts activated
• 7: months to migrate and train everyone
• 4: support staff delivered 1200 individual trainings via video

Innovation propels Arvesta forward: they continuously add new solutions, markets and acquisitions. To innovate, however, you have to be able to collaborate efficiently. And people within the organisation used different communication systems, which made collaborating with external partners more complicated. Employees had opened up their drives to share files, but this eventually led to problems seeing who had access to them, so something had to change.

‘We received complaints about the cloud-only suite we were using’, says Lien Verschueren, Head of IT Operations at Arvesta. ‘People like to have fully fledged applications on their PC, and many of our colleagues have to make complex calculations as part of their work – not only in accounting – where Microsoft Excel is still the main reference.’

Arvesta therefore contacted various organisations to guide the switch to Microsoft 365 and ultimately went with The Flow – a consultancy that is part of the Cronos Group. Verschueren: ‘The Cronos Group stood out in terms of technology and their proposal immediately included the right scope for us and was within budget. They had already clearly sketched out the technical process for us with a comprehensive roadmap – despite the fact that it was difficult to map out the best order for migrating all our mailboxes and applications because our various document sources and applications were all intertwined. The Flow also paid a lot of attention to end-user adoption.’

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Pandemic accelerated migration

Arvesta also set up an internal team and a steering group. Together with The Flow, they launched the project in early 2020 – just before the coronavirus pandemic. This raised the question of whether it was a good time to start such an integral project, but Arvesta actually decided to speed things up – after all, having to work remotely became even more important for the organisation.

Unfortunately, however, the project soon hit a stumbling block when it underwent a major cyberattack in 2020. ‘We had to put the phased migration on hold for a while to defend against the attack and add the necessary protection to our infrastructure. But this actually led us to further improve our security with better identity management, partly thanks to conditional access and Azure AD’, Verschueren explains. Arvesta also benefits from the improved device management and management of its updates since the migration, which is even more important in the new organisation with more remote working.

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Better control over applications and a low-code future

The Flow used Microsoft FastTrack to move files one by one to SharePoint and OneDrive, and a special migration tool – Quest – for the calendars and mailboxes. One of the biggest challenges was migrating applications that were connected in the previous cloud suite. According to the IT manager, people had been quite creative in the past. But Microsoft 365 has now given Arvesta more control over these various applications, and they have even discovered new applications included in the licence, such as Bookings and Whiteboard. They aim to use more Microsoft Power Apps and low-code software development next year to glue small processes together.

With AODocs, Arvesta previously had a top layer above its cloud suite for sharing personal drives with colleagues. ‘But that always required approval, whereas colleagues can now build Team Workspaces themselves. The Flow also designed a number of good portals with SharePoint, which means collaboration now runs much more smoothly and efficiently and we get more control.’

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1200 individual support sessions

The migration started in February 2021 in a first wave that continued until the summer, with the second and final wave in September and October. To ensure that everyone could work well with the new Microsoft 365 suite, Arvesta and The Flow together offered digital support sessions to every employee the day after their mailbox and file migrations.

The four-person support team allowed one hour per employee, which resulted in 1200 individual sessions! Each team also included a support group with ambassadors for colleagues to ask questions, and they can still open tickets with the support desk today.

‘A big change like this requires careful consideration and planning in advance, and a phased approach like ours is of course a bit more expensive than a big bang, but the decision depends on how digitally mature your organisation is. Our management team could follow the progress of the migration project on our custom dashboard’, Verschueren explains.

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A range of new applications

An Office migration with 1200 licences during lockdown is no small feat. ‘But Cronos is one of the leading experts in Belgium in this area. They can not only bring together a whole battery of specialists, they are also flexible and give immediate feedback – even remotely’, Verschueren concludes.

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‘The Flow paid a lot of attention to the end-user experience.’

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‘Colleagues can now build Teams workspaces themselves. The Flow also designed various document portals with SharePoint, which means collaboration runs much more smoothly and efficiently and we have more control.’

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Lien Verschueren, Head of IT Operations at Arvesta