The company
The Winning Group is an Australian, fourth generation family-owned business established in 1906. The company comprises various brands such as Appliances Online, Winning Appliances, Winning Services, Helix, and Home Clearance. Across these brandsWinning Group has served over two million happy customers, employs over 1,000 people, and has hundreds of IT users.
The scope
With diverse interests, Winning Group faces a broad spectrum of challenges. The company has employees in 35 locations and distribution centers across Australia and New Zealand, making it a mammoth task to unify people, brands and logistics.
James Murty, Head of Technology Operations at Winning Group, joined the business a decade ago, and since then has been bringing the company’s IT systems up-to-date, unifying all brands under the same platform, and handling the complex and fast-paced turnover of employees.
“I was hired by Appliances Online, one of the subsidiaries of Winning Group. From there it was almost like a “reverse takeover” of the company, as we transferred from on-prem to the Cloud, and then started to do the same for the other brands under the umbrella.”
Mergers, acquisitions and the value of CloudM – Managed migrations
Over the last 10 years, Winning Group has been involved in several major takeovers and has acquired multiple smaller businesses, making migrations quite common. Some of the smaller acquisitions were completed manually using Google’s free migration tools, but they posed problems. A Google Partner recommended CloudM for their next Migration.
“Some things Google just isn’t good at, but CloudM is. If you’ve got fifty users or fifty thousand, there’s a tool set there in CloudM that fills a lot of gaps in Google’s offering.”
James Murty, Head of Technology Operations, Winning Group
How CloudM helped
CloudM was used for a serviced migration of about 50-60 users and upwards of four terabytes of data. James explains. “It took a couple of weeks and there were no issues at all, and it was pretty early in the introduction to CloudM when I realised I definitely wanted this software.”
Beyond tactical and transactional migration solutions, Winning Group quickly saw the value in CloudM’s broader solution stack. The ability to automate onboarding and offboarding and archive leavers data according to dynamic user groups were highlighted. But it was two features that really appealed: Role Based Access and our onboarding/offboarding functionality.
Automating onboarding and offboarding of IT users
CloudM’s selective access feature allows admins to handle their tasks without needing full access to everything but allowing them to complete their core tasks. CloudM’s platform significantly reduces the time spent on onboarding and offboarding, especially given the high turnover rate at Winning Group, with about 25% of the workforce turning over annually, due to student and seasonal workers.
When it comes to onboarding and offboarding, CloudM software paid for itself in time saved alone. James estimates that he is saving approximately 10 hours a week.
“Unfortunately, Google doesn’t have a nice way of offboarding people built into their product. CloudM’s offboarding workflow easily saves me 10 hours a week.”
Archive: Retention of leavers data
An unexpected bonus for Winning Group was the CloudM Archive tool.
Due to the nature of having so many different businesses under one parent company, data retention is critical. For example, contracts that last five years might have been signed by someone who moved on after a year, so all that information must be saved and accessible.
Previously, Winning Group stored everything using Amazon S3, but the ongoing costs were considerable. Since adopting CloudM Archive, costs have been reduced and data management has become more efficient.
“We just use CloudM Archive and it’s all automated. It’s great, once they go into the offboarding pipeline I don’t have to think about them again.”
Enhanced security and granular access control
With a background in legal entities and Universities, James emphasizes the importance of security. Before using CloudM, managers had no way to delegate certain tasks, such as setting an employees status to away without accessing their mailbox. CloudM’s granular access controls, and immutable audit trail, ensures that should there ever be an accusation of improper conduct, James has access to a record of what actually happened. This feature prevents any potential misuse and maintains a high level of trust and security within the organization.
Looking toward the future – Self-service migrations and email signatures
Winning Group plans to expand its use of CloudM products across its brands.
“We have a migration coming up in the next couple of weeks. CloudM built a server for me to test it on. I’m only migrating around 15 people, so it’s perfect to try doing it for myself to get the hang of it before we attempt a larger one.”
Additionally, managing email signatures across 30 domains and with people constantly moving between brands, is challenging. CloudM’s alias domain signature feature will simplify this process once James has optimized Winning Group’s directory structure.
