Client story Westland Milk improves its Microsoft Teams maturity to boost collaboration and efficiency.

Facts at a glance

Client industry:

Agriculture

Challenge:

Westland Milk had been using Microsoft Teams for 18 months when they began to notice key issues around governance, particularly in the optimisation of data, files and documents shared in Teams. With over 650 employees collaborating via Teams every day, the company was keen to determine the best strategy for managing growth and maximising value going forward.

Solution:

Insight conducted a Teams maturity assessment to better understand how they can mitigate risk and ensure the business is extracting maximum value from Microsoft Teams. Insight’s specialists assessed everything from Westland Milks’ vision and goals for Teams to security, lifecycle management and adoption of new features. 

Results:

Insight offered a range of recommendations to help the company optimise how it uses Teams. These recommendations have allowed the Westland Milk team to increase operational efficiency and reduce the number of applications being deployed unnecessarily. In doing so, they have created opportunities to adopt and use new Microsoft Teams features in a sustainable way. 

Solution area:

Insight’s Modern Workplace solutions help clients digitally transform their operations to improve user engagement and experience.

Westland Milk turned to Insight Enterprises to conduct a Microsoft Teams Maturity Assessment. This has helped the company implement best practice governance and security processes, increase operational efficiency and optimise its use of the platform to improve collaboration across the organisation.

The company had been using Microsoft Teams for 18 months when it began to notice key issues around governance, particularly in the optimisation of data, files and documents shared in Teams. With over 650 employees collaborating via Teams every day, the company was keen to determine the best strategy for managing growth and maximising value going forward. 

“When we moved online with the pandemic, our Teams usage exploded as people began collaborating and storing files and documents within Teams groups. It made us really aware of the need to make sure all of this is happening in the most efficient and most appropriate way.” Kerri Broadhurst, Head of Enterprise and Operations, Westland Milk NZ

Kicking off the maturity journey

Westland Milk’s established relationship with Insight as a software procurement partner made it the ideal company to approach when optimising Microsoft Teams became a priority.

“The Westland Milk team had some big goals for Teams but little clarity around what they needed to do to achieve these goals and how to follow best practice. So, we suggested that they conduct the Microsoft Teams Maturity Assessment – which was also a great opportunity for us to take on our first New Zealand reference client.”

– Rachael Lattimore, Account Manager, Insight New Zealand

The company was already using Microsoft Teams for internal collaboration, mostly for chat and videoconferencing. Its long-term goals included rolling out Microsoft Teams telephony for collaboration, as well as implementing better governance around how data and documents are shared and stored on the platform.

Insight conducted a workshop with the Westland Milk IT team to determine the company’s maturity across seven measurements: vision, roles and responsibilities, business usage, lifecycle management, security, compliance and adoption.

Based on these findings, Insight offered a range of recommendations to help the company optimise how it uses Teams, including:

• Streamlining data retention and recovery by standardising how teams, groups and projects are set up within the platform
• Improving the user onboarding and offboarding processes by partially automating the creation and allocation of accounts and licences
• Developing and implementing a well-defined set of security standards and processes for dealing with security threats
• Delegating responsibilities at the application or solution level to reduce over-reliance on IT administrator privileges to maintain and monitor system health.

“There were some really interesting revelations for us, especially in the security space. And we’ve been able to action Insight’s recommendations already. We’ve implemented new policies around monitoring applications that run in Teams, started running application tests before deployment, and set up proper templates for the standard creation of groups and projects in Teams.”

– Kerri Broadhurst, Enterprise Architect, Westland Milk NZ

These actions have allowed the Westland Milk team to increase operational efficiency and reduce the number of applications being deployed unnecessarily. In doing so, they have created opportunities to adopt and use new Microsoft Teams features in a sustainable way.

Accelerating the digital transformation

As a trusted software licensing partner, Insight has also helped Westland Milk procure, manage and optimise its enterprise technology. This has enabled the company to drive significant cost savings and implement tech solutions along with best practice IT governance.

Licensing Microsoft products through Insight provides Westland Milk transparency over their billing so that it can identify inefficiencies, eliminate overspending and better align IT spend with the company’s growth trajectory.

“The improved transparency around our billing information has been incredibly helpful. We’re keen to get Insight’s support in cost management and enterprise technology planning as we continue to grow our Azure footprint.” Kerri Broadhurst, Head of Enterprise and Operations, Westland Milk NZ