As told by Ivan Samarin, Head of Group Plant IT, MM Group

In partnership with Klaus Greimel, Customer Partner, Kyndryl

MM Group’s executive management agreed on a change of technical strategy to match the business acquisition strategy: The company would move from on-premises IT systems to fully managed operations. The result would be a new way of working, running IT infrastructure as a service and enabling the internal IT team to focus on value-added information analysis undertakings.
 

Outsourcing the management of infrastructure would also remove support-ticket workload from the IT department, freeing up personnel resources. Employees who were familiar with emailing questions and requests directly to IT staff would in the future switch to a centralized support service, which would use automation to improve response times and increase resolution success.
 

To manage the impact of corporate acquisitions, MM Group’s new technology partner would be tasked with building, scaling and deploying additional capacity as required, leaving the newly re-named Information Management department free to devote time to business integration. With global operations running 24/7, MM Group needed a partner capable of mitigating business risk during the transition and into the future.
 

MM Group considered offers from multiple vendors, including proposals to offshore both the data center and support services, and move immediately to an all-cloud solution. Understanding the criticality of MM Group’s infrastructure, Kyndryl Consult proposed to minimize project risk by starting with an initial like-for-like migration, followed by structured programs for hybrid-cloud, all-cloud and offshore transformations.

With the business growth strategy in full swing, MM Group acquired 21 new manufacturing sites, plus two sales offices, to expand into the pharmaceuticals packaging sector. Each acquisition came with a Transition of Services Agreement (TSA), that in some cases specified timescales as short as 12 months.
 

Faced with this dramatic growth and very short transition times, MM Group’s in-house team would not have been able to scale up sufficiently. To manage the initial migration and new work generated by ongoing acquisitions, MM Group and Kyndryl planned for extensive knowledge transfer for servers, databases, applications, interfaces and networks. The original MM Group IT infrastructure included more than 2,000 physical and virtual servers, and the new purchase of the pharmaceutical packaging company added a further 400 servers, including solutioning with Microsoft Azure at the U.S. sites for central services.

Together, MM Group and Kyndryl migrated more than 1,500 physical and virtual servers, including VMware virtual machines and Kubernetes containers. Where the landscape included specialist and proprietary solutions, Kyndryl engaged with the relevant third-party vendors and alliance partners for assistance, all covered within the single services arrangement, which reduced administration for MM Group and ensured integrated management and governance.
 

As the MM Group IT department remodeled its operations, Kyndryl introduced a central support center, using ServiceNow to manage incidents, and offering services in English, French, German and Polish. By managing all support requests centrally, Kyndryl is able to offer faster, standardized and rationalized support throughout MM Group.
 

Although originally outside the project scope, Kyndryl also deployed its Application Workbench solution to help MM Group manage legacy applications and resolve issues as speedily as possible.
 

MM group plans to continue the rollout of SAP into their production sites. Their SAP S/4 HANA landscape is managed by Kyndryl Managed Services to seamlessly integrate any new SAP workloads into their infrastructure services.

MM Group is a global leader in consumer packaging, employing approximately 15,000 people across 71 locations in 33 countries. MM Board & Paper produces 3.1 million tonnes of cartonboard, paper, and pulp annually, while MM Packaging manufactures 4.0 billion cubic meters of folding cartons each year for customers in the FMCG, pharmaceutical, and luxury industries.