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Industry · Engineering and manufacturing
Multi-site, multi-country, acquired one plant at a time. Large CAD and drawing archives, a works council in Germany, and a tenant per acquisition nobody has consolidated. This is most of our European work.
Engineering and manufacturing groups grow by acquisition. Each plant or subsidiary arrives with its own Microsoft 365 tenant, its own reseller, its own way of doing things, and often its own domain. Ten years later there are eight tenants, four resellers, and nobody who can see the whole estate.
The data is heavy in a specific way: large CAD files and drawing archives in SharePoint or, more often, still on file servers; project mailboxes that have accumulated for a decade; shared drives organised by project number that nobody dares reorganise. Mailbox archives above 100 GB are common, and they set the migration schedule on their own.
And in Germany — where a large share of European manufacturing sits — endpoint management falls under works council co-determination. A rollout planned as though Germany were like everywhere else gets stopped after deployment.
What we see in this sector
Not a list of features. The things that actually change scope, sequence and price when the client is in engineering and manufacturing.
Consolidation is not a project you do once; it is a capability you need on call. We have run eight tenants into three for one group and seventeen into one for another, and the second acquisition is always faster than the first because the structure exists.
CAD libraries and project archives rarely moved to the cloud with the mail. They are large, permissions are deep, and engineers cannot be without them for a weekend. The move is planned by project folder, not by volume.
Frontline plans (F1, F3) cost a fraction of Business Premium and fit the plant floor. Mixing plans by role — office on E3, floor on F3, a few on E5 — is usually the largest licensing saving in the sector.
Intune, Conditional Access and Defender require co-determination, not consultation. We start that conversation in parallel with the technical design, and we have a written explanation of what each component collects ready for the first meeting.
Not automatically, and anyone who says otherwise has not tried. Linked assemblies and external references break when paths change. We inventory the linked structures first, move them as units, and where the CAD tool supports it, use its own relink function afterwards. Some libraries are better left on a file server or in Azure Files, and we will say so.
Each entity is invoiced by our EU entity in its own currency — euros in Germany, zloty in Poland, koruna in Czechia — under one relationship. The tenant country setting decides eligibility, not the office address.
No. Licensing can be brought under one partner of record while the tenants stay separate, and renewal dates aligned so the estate can be reviewed as a whole. Consolidation is then a technical decision, not a commercial one.
About three months for two tenants of moderate complexity. Our 17-into-1 healthcare consolidation at roughly 500 users took three months. Large project archives and a works council approval running in parallel are what extend it.
Yes. Frontline plans are designed for shared devices and phones: Teams for shift communication, SharePoint for procedures, Entra ID for badge-based sign-in. F3 costs a fraction of an office licence and includes Intune.
Scoping costs nothing
Tenant count, rough headcount, which countries, and what is driving the date. You get back a sequence, an honest view of what will be slow, and a fixed price — usually within one business day.