Technology Services maps future IT strategy for ALPLA

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Case study
ALPLA
Industry
Manufacturing
“There is greater availability of systems within the production and supply
chain and it is much easier to implement new services. It has matched the
IT function with the needs of the ALPLA organization.”
— Stefan Berchtold, corporate IT system engineer and project manager, ALPLA
“Standardization is our biggest challenge,” says
Klaus P. Metzler, CIO and project sponsor, ALPLA.
“We needed to identify which services we could
centralize – in economic as well as performance
terms – and then consolidate.”
ALPLA’s Corporate IT Systems team of seven
(Stefan Berchtold, Matthias Fink, Johann
Foedeles, Christian Putz, Daniel Schrom,
Stefan Toeerl and Michael Wakolbinger) are
responsible for the company’s corporate IT
systems, including communication, security
and network services. With the infrastructure
hardware due for replacement (a previous IT
strategy was drawn up, inhouse, in 2003),
Berchtold says it was evident the business
needed to do more than just buy like-for-like
replacements, though he was unclear what
the new vision would look like: “There was an
opportunity to improve our servers and
services but who would be able to support
us in such a project?”
Needing an overview of all aspects of the
IT infrastructure, Berchtold realized he would
need to upgrade to a global rather than local
partner, ideally one with experience of similar
projects. Previously, local specialists served
each specialist function – email services,
network, Active Directory.
“We knew these wouldn’t have the scale to
create a global vision within the same time
frame,” says Berchtold. “That’s when we were
introduced to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”
HPE was a server supplier to the business,
but ALPLA was unaware of its consulting
services. Crucially, says Berchtold, HPE was
able to provide references. “It’s a huge
company with global presence – and it
had done a similar project with the Austrian
Embassies around the world. That we could
see this in action made us comfortable
allowing HPE to present its case.”
Solution
Workshops to clarify business objectives
To gain a complete view of ALPLA’s
requirements, HPE set about organizing
a series of workshops, establishing a
five-year IT strategy. “It wasn’t that we
were blind to the IT challenge,” says
Berchtold, “but HPE did a great job in
bringing us together as an organization.
The workshops involved SharePoint
services, business intelligence, ERP systems
– departments we hadn’t necessarily covered
in the past. And what did we find out? That
we all wanted the same things.”