Work safely and flexibly from anywhere: The cloud-based workplace with Azure Virtual Desktop

The challenge: Transitioning from outdated IT to cloud

Michael Weinig AG has been producing machines and system solutions for the wood processing industry for over 100 years. While these were purely mechanical at first, the company was soon adding more and more electronic components to its systems to improve their speed, efficiency, and precision. Today, many of the machines produced by this medium-sized company are controlled entirely digitally. With its own production facilities and subsidiaries in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia, Michael Weinig AG is a global market leader. Its production organization workflows are highly digitized and connected. Continuously simplifying and streamlining internal processes ensures that the customers running these systems can create the greatest possible value.

To expand Michael Weinig AG’s worldwide network, the company’s CIO and Head of IT Dr. Rainer Vollmer decided to replace the Citrix environment. He sought to make subsidiaries independent of corporate IT and provide them all with a shared working platform. “My vision was to democratize the workplace and enable people to work flexibly from anywhere, or use desk sharing to have no fixed workplace at all,” Dr. Vollmer says. The plan was to reconstruct the entire infrastructure and related IT management using Microsoft 365.

“Microsoft offers so many possibilities under one roof, making it very easy to map the complete infrastructure. No other provider can do that at this level of complexity,” says Dr. Vollmer, who has been relying on Microsoft solutions for 30 years. “On top of that, with this option we can rest assured that the portfolio will be expanded to include lots of innovations in the future.” Michael Weinig AG did not stop at Word, Excel, and PowerPoint: its security stack, client deployment, and client management are now based on other Microsoft solutions, including Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Endpoint Manager. The rollout of Azure Virtual Desktop was also planned as part of the transition to the cloud to map legacy applications and make them available to users.

The solution: Digital workplaces prevent VPN congestion and make traveling obsolete

Michael Weinig AG had planned to spend 24 months on implementation. But then came the COVID-19 health crisis, and there was no time to lose. Provisioning virtual desktops and making them available worldwide became a priority overnight. In record time, Bechtle GmbH in Stuttgart was selected as the right partner for this project through a tender process. “We were able to quickly develop an impressive and consistent concept for implementation, infrastructure, and project planning,” says Alexander Baron, Head of Microsoft and Workplace Management at Bechtle in Stuttgart. Such speedy progress was exactly what Dr. Vollmer’s project team needed. Together, they managed to fully roll out a production version of the Virtual Desktop in next to no time.

Today, Azure Virtual Desktop provides Michael Weinig AG’s employees working from home with a central access point for all applications. The number of people using the VPN connection for remote access has dropped from around 700 to 70. The sales team now also has virtual access to all the software they need to generate quotations online. But it is in maintenance that the Virtual Desktop has had the biggest impact. “In the past, our employees had to travel all over the world to maintain and repair our machines,” Dr. Vollmer explains. Often, the systems were out of commission until the maintenance team arrived. Today, this is no longer the case. “Thanks to the Virtual Desktop, it’s now possible for someone in Russia to do maintenance work in South America, and vice versa. This means that we’re less affected by travel restrictions and can reduce machine downtimes.”

Through Azure Virtual Desktop, Michael Weinig AG has now reached a new level of digital transformation, while also gaining a new platform for further investment and innovation. The next step will be to switch to Teams telephony and to further expand Remote Assist via Teams. In addition, the planning process will be converted to a self-service model with Power BI as a financial reporting tool. Data will then be visible and available to everyone at any time, ending the tedious process of sending Excel files from A to B and making reporting 200 percent faster. “None of this would be possible without the platform based on Azure Virtual Desktop, the integrable products, and the respective infrastructure,” Dr. Vollmer concludes.