In early 2007, Cadbury Schweppes took the strategic decision to demerge their confectionary and beverages businesses.
The confectionary company (Cadbury) retained the lion’s share of the existing IT infrastructure and prosource.it was asked to assist with the planning, build out and migration of the Wintel infrastructure for the new beverages company (Dr Pepper Snapple Group).
The scope of the project included the migration of 6000 users and workstations spread over 160 locations in 4 time zones.
Prosource.it based a team at DPSG’s Dallas, Texas headquarters. The project was split into two main phases
Preparation
phase
During this time the following tasks were completed -
- Defined and built out a new separated Active Directory infrastructure capable
of supporting the expected user base.
- Worked with existing Exchange hosts for the provision of an outsourced Exchange
environment for the new company.
- Defined the migration process, wrapped around the Quest Migration Manager
for Exchange toolset.
- Performed extensive data gathering to determine target users, workstations,
resource servers and application servers.
- Adjustment of the source and target environments to support the migration
process.
- Designed a migration support process, defined the migration support team
Migration
phase
6000 users, workstations & mailboxes, 200 application servers, 25 resource
servers were migrated to the new environments. The actual migration was completed
within 8 weeks and to customer schedule to meet demerger requirements.
Working under the Cadbury Schweppes Transformation Programme, Prosource.it was tasked with conceiving and implementing a service improvement project. The Enhance IT goal was to herald a positive agenda of change and demonstrating what ‘best in class’ customer focus and service can be like. The project spearheaded an improvement in services, solutions and customer focus at five selected sites in London, Dallas, Birmingham and New York.
With the input and assistance of the businesses and IT representatives, project teams comprising of technical and soft skill resources visited each site for 6wks canvassing opinions, gathered feedback, identifying and delivering improvements. Customer views were gathered through multiple channels with face to face discussions with identified key individuals, selected representative groups and other site wide information gathering, involving web survey, e-mail, desk side visits and comment cards.
Improvements included meeting room enhancements; a meeting room booking system, wireless connectivity; local IT team reorganisation, replacement printers and the delivery of a range of tailored training and coaching opportunities for site staff.
The project identified a significant number of medium and long term activities, which will contribute to the continued improvement of IT services, aligned with business needs. These activities are varied in scale, reach and achievable timeframes and represent a valuable input for IT planning. Local site specific findings and recommendations from the initiative have much wider, regional or global reach. Common themes were collated by the Enhance IT project as it visited subsequent sites and fed into the wider transformation programme, forming a valuable business mandate for medium and long term investment.
The overall contribution made by the Enhance IT has been almost unanimously welcomed and applauded by the customer community at the site.