Sachtleben Minerals: Crystallising a shared future with Citrix

Sachtleben Minerals – Crystallising a shared future with Citrix.

Sachtleben Minerals is a supplier of barite and fluorite products, the industrial minerals mined by its subsidiaries, Sachtleben Bergbau and Deutsche Baryt Industrie. Bechtle built a unified IT landscape for the group that has been deployed across its four sites. Users at each one of the group’s companies now have access to the same applications, data and directories through a Citrix-powered Modern Workplace. More of a hike than a walk, every step towards the new folder structure was well worth it, as it makes the lives of employees sharing and collaborating on files that much easier.

Project details.

Services

Cloud
Client Management
Modern Workplace

Industry

Chemical / Extractive

Manufacturer

Citrix, Microsoft

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Challenge.

Sachtleben Minerals is the marketing organisation for its two producing companies, Sachtleben Bergbau and Deutsche Baryt Industrie. The supplier of industrial minerals has four sites, each of which used to operate a different IT system with its own folder structure, and employees with the parent company were forced to work with these discrete and heterogeneous resources. Since Sachtleben Minerals does not have its own IT staff, the entire infrastructure was being managed by two different third-party service providers.

Our organisation is composed of a parent holding company and two operative sites. Each one of these used to work on its own isolated system. When we consolidated all our assets, we also wanted a shared IT infrastructure that enables fast access and response times. Bechtle’s recommendation was to deploy a Citrix system, and that’s just what we needed. Bechtle and Sachtleben Minerals spent a lot of time working on building and migrating a new folder structure together.

Marco Manna, Commercial Director, Sachtleben Minerals GmbH & Co. KG

When the organisation consolidated its diverse assets, Sachtleben Minerals decided to also unify the IT systems across its sites, including an ERP and financial system. Most importantly, however, the company wanted all employees with the parent and operational units to be able to access a shared folder structure. An on-premise solution would not deliver the required performance to allow all users to work on the same server at once. What’s more, some of the locations only have poor access to the internet. Frequent downtime and sluggish access to data prompted Sachtleben Minerals to seek a new, unified solution to be deployed by a new and capable IT partner. The future IT solution was to deliver secure and fast data access and highly responsive applications for all employees everywhere. It was also supposed to eliminate the biggest pain point by offering a shared folder structure across all sites, with no exceptions.

Solution.

Bechtle proposed to build a solution combining Citrix Virtual App and Desktop Client and Microsoft Office 365 to create a secure and homogeneous infrastructure. This allows all of Sachtleben’s systems to be consolidated into one and gives users shared resources across all sites. Even the users at locations that suffer from poor internet connectivity can leverage high performance for applications such as the company’s financial system and the Hamburger Software ERP solution. This is because Citrix—hosted in the Frankfurt data centre—only streams the exact resources to Sachtleben Mineral’s thin clients they need, when they need them, and nothing more. Employees working at the Clara Pit mine, for instance, are even able to work with their thin clients on an LTE connection without sacrificing performance. Citrix also gives Sachtleben Minerals a unified access matrix for transparent authorisation management. For the new system, Bechtle also replaced the previous, organically grown structure with one that’s aware of department lines. A dual backup strategy employs Veeam for backups in the Frankfurt data centre, as well as Bechtle Backup as a Service BHO for twice the data safety. And if Sachtleben Minerals does experience issues, Bechtle is on hand with dedicated first and second-level support.

In addition to setting up a new IT system, Sachtleben Minerals and Bechtle worked together to create a consistent folder structure, spending a lot of time on building new directories to be shared by all companies. The project team on this task was composed of employees working in the mine, the refinery, and administration, with one representative of each of these units making sure the new structure meets their requirements without creating a need for exceptions. Bechtle then proceeded to build the new folder structure on-premise to enable all users to familiarise themselves with it before eventually migrating it to a Bechtle private cloud in the data centre. This final migration could be wrapped up in just one weekend.

Business benefits.

The whole project was demanding in terms of both time and flexibility, but Bechtle and Sachtleben Minerals rose to the challenge together. The new Citrix system now enables Sachtleben Minerals’ employees to work efficiently across sites on a secure and future-oriented IT infrastructure that keeps all the organisation’s digital assets safe from outside threats. Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams and other solutions enable effective collaboration for all the dispersed employees. With a consistent folder structure, Sachtleben Minerals now has a future-ready and easy-to-manage overall solution with one IT system that does it all and can quickly adapt and scale to new requirements of the company and its subsidiaries.