Solistica transforms the collaboration and security environment of more than 7,000 employees with Microsoft 365

Solistica is a multinational company originating in Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, which is part of the strategic business division of the FEMSA Group. Founded in 1998 as a logistics department, the Femsa Logística business unit was formed, now known as Solistica. Its goal is to become a strategic partner to its customers for the ability to comprehensively manage its supply chain with value solutions and technology. In this way, it offers comprehensive 3PL logistics solutions, with operations in three main regions: Mexico, Brazil, and Central America. 

Solistica's growing organic and inorganic expansion brought about the need to unify its ways of working as part of the digital transformation strategy. This was achieved through basic principles such as the deployment of the Microsoft 365 productivity cloud that includes smart services and security technologies to protect businesses. Ivonne Escobar, IT Strategy and Transformation Manager, says: "The company had been growing inorganically through the acquisition of other companies; however, many of them already had IT environments, ways of working, and their own practices. In some cases, this made it difficult to collaborate and adopt the business strategy." In this situation, there was a need to standardize the technology of its communication, collaboration, and security tools. 

Challenges to a migration process 

Several of the companies that were acquired by Solistica already had some collaboration tools based on Microsoft technology, which was an advantage when deploying Microsoft 365. 

One of the important challenges during the process was that, with the COVID-19 pandemic, the adoption of technology had to be executed remotely and the Technology and Digital Innovation Team became a key group. It used the same tools of the platform such as Microsoft Bookings, with which appointments could be scheduled by teams and daily migration sessions could be established through Microsoft Teams. Eros Guillén, ITO Leader, explains: "Through joint planning, it was possible to transform and unify the collaboration environment in just four months, migrating more than 7,000 users to Microsoft 365." 

The process began with the unification of the domains, enabling all the necessary infrastructure in Azure. Subsequently, the migration of the accounts and computer equipment from the different domains to the target domain was carried out, resulting in the implementation of various collaboration tools on Office 365. This transition helped drive a new working culture across its operations. Currently, 100% of employees in these countries have migrated to Microsoft 365. 

Increased productivity and business intelligence 

One of the productivity tools that has taken center stage at Solistica is Microsoft MyAnalytics, an application that suggests more productive ways of working, and it has helped uncover the impact that migration has had within the company. In addition, MyAnalytics is able to analyze data on how one is working, benefiting important decision making. Today, more than 50% of employees actively use this tool. Leobardo Guajardo, Head of Digital Innovation at Solistica, comments: "MyAnalytics is useful for building intelligence around topics such as the use of time, planning our activities, ways of working, and among other benefits, the use of our focus." 

Skype for Business, meanwhile, has been replaced by Microsoft Teams, which has become the company's main channel of communication and collaboration globally, transforming the day-to-day life of its collaborators. Within Teams, the company developed some bots with Power Virtual Agents that integrate with chats. These bots function as a real-time and automatic help desk in the event of technical doubts or incidents related to the technological transition. 

Microsoft Teams Live Events managed to host high-impact events with employees participating in livestreams. In addition, to encourage the use of other collaboration tools integrated into Microsoft 365 – Planner, OneDrive, SharePoint – different adoption campaigns were carried out through webinars, also executed through Teams Live Events in Spanish and Portuguese.  

In business intelligence and analytics, to consolidate the reports that all organizations commonly have, Solistica uses Power BI, a tool with which they have been able to unify reports from different areas—from financial to operational—all on the same platform.

The armored security of Microsoft 365

Solistica achieved its expansion with the acquisition of some companies that already had different technologies from each other – security issues could not be left out. Alejandro De León, CTSO at Solistica, explains that a 2020-2021 strategy was introduced to maximize the use of various Microsoft security tools, including everything related to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, a security platform designed to help business networks prevent, detect, and respond to advanced threats.  

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint sought to unify management for better control, starting with anti-virus (anti-malware) migration, enabling EDR features and addressing vulnerabilities of endpoints they previously had in different security tools. "One of the main benefits has been the centralization of security management, which has given us greater visibility and vulnerability management in the countries where we have a presence," says De León. 

Today, Solistica has a unified IT environment and a single cloud domain delivered by Azure Active Directory, making it easy to manage employee identities as well as logins and access to Microsoft 365 resources such as document validation and conditional access. "Before, being in different domains, it was difficult to have an effective communication tool in different countries. Microsoft 365 has created a more flexible working culture, and this has transformed our company," says Alejandro De León, CTSO at Solistica. 

Additionally, to strengthen access security, the company is considering enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA), which adds a layer of protection to the login process. "With Microsoft 365 solutions we have improved Solistica's security, and we are confident that we are complying with the security frameworks and laws applicable to our industry and that of our customers," says De León.   

Vision for the future: Drill down into Microsoft 365 

Solistica has worked on a full implementation of Microsoft 365, both in collaboration and security. The company has become a very important reference within the Group due to its rapid and effective adoption of technology. The company is currently working on implementing advanced security features such as Microsoft Intune, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and exploring Azure Sentinel capabilities.  

In the future, Solistica would like to continue to deepen the use of Microsoft 365. David Orellana, CIO of the company, points out: "In the fantastic journey of digital transformation, collaboration and having strategic allies to support us on the path of innovation is vital to continue promoting our business in this new era. With this focus at Solistica, we are building not only as logistics partners for our customers, but also as their technology partners."