Microland Ensured Global Divestiture and Migration for a Fortune 500 American Locomotive Manufacturer in its Merger with a Fortune 50 Conglomerate’s Transportation Business

Overview

The client is an American locomotive manufacturer with products and services for customers in the locomotive, freight, marine, and mining industries. Its range of products include rail braking systems, locomotive cab components, HVAC and engine cooling systems, power and auxiliary energy solutions, suspension and vibration control, and other rolling stock components, along with locomotive servicing, overhaul, and repair services. The client operates in over 50 countries globally with a workforce of 27,000 employees.

Challenge

The client underwent a merger with the transportation business of a Fortune 50 conglomerate. The merger established the customer as a leader in global transportation and logistics products and solutions market by combining the customer’s broad range of freight, transit, and electronics products with the acquiring entity’s best-in-class equipment, services, and digital solutions in the locomotive, mining, marine, stationary power, and drilling industries.

The client’s key priority was to ensure minimal impact on the business operations given that 20% of the world’s freight is moved by locomotives built and maintained by the client. Any impact on its operations could impact the logistics and operations of its end customers. 

Microland, being the incumbent service provider of the acquired entity’s parent organization, was aware of the technology estate, tools, and processes. Microland was engaged to support the customer with migration and integration of their user mailbox, servers, application, and networks.

Solution

Some of the challenges during the migration were:

• The customer’s infrastructure estate consisted of legacy devices needing manual execution of migration tasks leading to additional efforts and longer project duration
• Network configuration and policies were not standardized and sub-optimal
• Due to the covid-19 related lockdown in multiple countries, provisioning of hardware and circuits and their deployment were delayed
• Ensuring network interconnectivity and application accessibility between the two organizations during the migration to minimize the impact on business operations and user experience. All while ensuring access permissions to minimize cybersecurity threats in the interim infrastructure estate

Microland undertook the divestiture and migration in four phases:

• Discovery & Information Gathering: Gathering information about the sites, their architecture, infrastructure, applications, and users; creating an asset inventory; and categorizing application and infrastructure based on type, function, and priority for migration. We then conducted a risk assessment to identify any gaps in migration readiness and planning relevant remediation actions.
• Dependency Mapping: To understand the application and underlying infrastructure landscape, determine application and server dependencies, and documentation of these interdependencies to ensure seamless migration, testing, and post-migration functionality.
• Destination Architecture & Migration Planning: Design destination architecture, including all technical requirements with the client team. We then planned the migration project with stages, milestones, and deliverables, communicating with the stakeholders on the plan and responsibilities for effective migration.
• Migration Execution: Migration of application, remote site, and data center servers, file servers to cloud, user mailboxes, collaboration platforms, network devices to the new organization, and UAT testing to ensure seamless migration before cutover and decommissioning.

Business Benefits Delivered

Below are some of the benefits derived through our assessment and due diligence-led approach to ensure seamless migration with minimal disruption to business productivity and user experience:

• Accelerated info gathering - Leveraging automated scripts to accelerate error-free detailed info gathering of infrastructure and applications across 100+ sites for due diligence, readiness assessment, and migration planning
• Increased user experience & business productivity - Minimized disruptions to business productivity through detailed due diligence to identify risks, plan mitigative remediations and migration readiness, establish interim interconnectivity, and applications accessibility to ensure user productivity is not impacted.
• Minimal impact of covid-19 - Ensured minimal impact on the migration execution and business operations by reprioritizing and restructuring the migration plan.

Outcome

Microland helped the client migrate the below in 16 months: