Zöllner window construction GmbH

Zöllner has been dedicated to the production of wood-aluminum windows for 60 years. Based in Bernkastel-Kues in Rhineland-Palatinate, the traditional company's portfolio includes not only windows and front doors, but also conservatories, façades and individual custom-made products made exclusively from wood and aluminum. The roots of the family business, founded in 1938, lie in craftsmanship, which is why Zöllner still guarantees the best handcrafted custom work today: from comprehensive advice and planning to development and production through to installation. This is ensured by around 90 employees and a further 20 at the Luxembourg site in Sandweiler*. www.zoellner-fensterbau.de

*Status 2023

Management Summary

As part of a three-year growth strategy, Zöllner Fensterbau has set itself the task of optimizing its processes, standardizing its systems and establishing a hybrid working model. With the support of IT-HAUS GmbH , Microsoft 365 Business Premium was introduced in the company, which has won over both long-established employees and junior staff alike. Today, the customer uses the solution as a central platform for efficient collaboration, saves travel costs, solves customer problems in minutes and presents itself as a modern, attractive employer.

Added value for the customer

Project environment

The skilled trades are facing major challenges, including a shortage of skilled workers, supply bottlenecks and price increases for the required materials. At the same time, the demands of customers, suppliers and employees with regard to digital communication are growing, which is also being felt by the traditional company Zöllner.
Although, in addition to decades of experience and craftsmanship at a consistently high level, customer proximity is one of the secrets of its success, there was a considerable need for improvement, especially in the interaction with customers and in internal collaboration. While technical drawings and other documents could still be exchanged in the traditional way by e-mail, the employee responsible had to get in the car and drive to the customer at the latest when a change was requested - an immense time and cost factor. For queries with colleagues at the company headquarters, he had to use his cell phone. The growing hardware and application landscape in the company also repeatedly led to problems with filing, version control and sending and receiving files.
In an effort to open up to the topics of digitalization and process automation, modern mobile working and thus enable further growth, the window manufacturer developed a three-year strategy in close cooperation with its IT partner, IT-HAUS GmbH . This included standardizing the internal systems and managing them via a central, modern platform. As the customer was also planning to invest in modern collaboration tools for simplified, optimized communication, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 were the obvious choice as a holistic solution.
In an initial joint workshop, IT-HAUS , as a certified Microsoft Cloud Partner, showed those responsible the various options for using Microsoft Teams profitably in the company. Only then did the rollout begin. Key users from all business areas were involved in the process at an early stage, which had a positive effect on the acceptance of the new solution. Teams is also easy to understand and so user-friendly that even less IT-savvy employees were quickly able to concentrate on their core competencies.

Project success

Microsoft Teams has now established itself as more than just a tool for video conferences and calls within the company. The software is also used to work together on customer projects and exchange files. This has the advantage that there is no longer any confusion about the latest version of a document or the storage location of project-related information. Instead, working with a single, centralized platform guarantees that everyone involved has the same level of knowledge. In the past, employees sometimes had to travel for hours by car to clarify an issue, but today they can do this conveniently and efficiently via Teams. They can exchange information with customers and architects in shared rooms and share photos, sketches and the like. This not only saves travel costs: what used to take hours is now done in ten to 15 minutes.

The existing email inboxes, on the other hand, were migrated to Exchange Online in a second step in the process, which was also competently supported by IT-HAUS, so that the local Exchange server environment could be gradually replaced. Just recently, work also began on integrating the company's own ERP system into the Teams interface so that customer orders and order confirmations can also be processed via the platform in future.

As the process progressed, Microsoft SharePoint was introduced as another solution in the Microsoft 365 family at Zöllner. With the help of IT-HAUS GmbH , all files were moved from the existing file servers and local hard disks to SharePoint as the new, higher-level storage platform. As a result, employees can work more productively and efficiently than ever before from virtually anywhere. They simply need to connect to Teams via their mobile devices and can use SharePoint to upload photos of the customer's property or chat with colleagues for immediate support - benefiting everyone involved.

Before Microsoft 365 was introduced in the company, working from home was not a big issue for Zöllner. Today, however, more and more employees, especially younger ones, are using this option and accessing everything they need to work from home via the platform. In the future, all administrative employees in the company will be able to work digitally and hybrid. With a more modern working environment, the customer is creating the conditions for increasing its attractiveness as an employer, retaining its employees in the long term and holding its own in the competition for specialists and young talent.

As modern working also places high demands on IT security in the company, the next step will be to refuel and monitor mobile devices, which are currently still managed manually, centrally and from the cloud, and to provide them with updates and patches. This will also benefit the company's own IT department, which will be relieved of previous administration tasks and can focus on more important issues.

The transformation process that the company has undergone has not gone unnoticed by the window manufacturer's customers and business partners. With a more professional image, optimized and structured interactions and processes, Zöllner is taking traditional craftsmanship to a new level, expanding its customer base, boosting its growth and recording immense efficiency gains. But this process is far from over. After all, the consolidation of all solutions on one platform opens up completely new possibilities in terms of reporting, controlling and automation. Thanks to the Microsoft 365 tools, Zöllner wants to continue to guarantee the quality of a small craft business while scaling like a larger industrial company.

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