Millennium Services Group builds digital resilience with Microsoft 365 and Circle T

Summary

Millennium Services Group is an ASX listed company providing specialist cleaning and security services to large retail shopping centers, commercial and government properties, public transport, and large-scale events around Australia and New Zealand. Millennium grew from the acquisition of smaller businesses and its IT landscape – a tapestry of fragmented legacy systems – reflected this history. Working with strategic partner Circle T, Millennium wanted to establish a more cohesive IT strategy across the organization to deliver modern digital workplace capabilities powered by Microsoft 365. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced Millennium’s need to accelerate their adoption of digital processes. Now equipped with an enterprise knowledge platform and a fortified security posture, Millennium is seeing its digital vision become a digital reality.

Challenge

Formed in 2015, Millennium Services Group started as a group of independent small businesses. Corporate IT costs were high owing to multiple legacy on-premises data centers and duplicate, disparate technology systems across Australia and New Zealand.

Millennium’s 5,300-strong workforce are mobile and geographically dispersed with the overwhelming majority working at client premises. Less than 10% of employees had access to Millennium’s IT systems, which meant it was difficult for teams to collaborate and for leadership to quickly share information with all staff.

In the absence of a centralized content management system, employees stored documents and directories as local files on PCs and shared them via email attachments. This resulted in version control and compliance issues. Furthermore, sensitive or confidential data stored on laptops exposed Millennium to the risk of data loss and theft.

Millennium needed an enterprise modern digital workplace platform to unify content and communication, enable employee collaboration, adhere to compliance requirements, and provide its staff with secure mobile access.

Strategy

Millennium’s requirements around IT simplification and security were a clear fit to Microsoft’s Enterprise 365 capabilities and the modern digital workplace accelerators offered by Circle T. Millennium engaged Circle T to deploy Microsoft 365 as part of a six-month project to deliver a cohesive corporate intranet, robust content management capabilities, a reliable communication and collaboration platform, and secure mobile access.

Immediately preceding the national Australian and New Zealand lockdowns that transpired with the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, Millennium made the executive decision to go live with the Microsoft 365 solution weeks earlier than anticipated in order to mobilize work-from-home arrangements. Also, it had meant to roll out Microsoft 365 in a systematic order but resolved instead to go for a ‘big bang’ approach across the entire organization.

The decision was a calculated risk and it paid off. Staff were connected to Millennium on their BYO devices and Millennium made the transition to the new world of remote working. In addition, Millennium’s executives harnessed video conferencing in Microsoft Teams and Yammer Enterprise to reach staff and provide critical messaging.

Delighted with the outcome of the corporate intranet and Microsoft 365 roll out, Millennium and Circle T focused on extending the capabilities of the modern digital workplace, migrating Exchange, SharePoint on premise, and file share data to Microsoft 365 and protecting the estate with Microsoft E5 capability.

Highlights include the following:

• Circle T’s Controlled Document Manager on Microsoft 365 ensures Millennium’s corporate policies are readily accessible, well maintained, and compliant to business, legislative, and regulatory requirements
• Circle T’s Intelligent Intranet accelerates the roll out and content of Millennium’s corporate Intranet
• Microsoft 365 provides the entire workplace toolset from video conferencing, remote meetings, enterprise social, email, document storage and management to collaboration, automation, and intranet
• Staff and client-based workers are enabled with secure remote working technology, ensuring they can access vital information anytime, anywhere, and from any device
• Microsoft E5 Security and Compliance suite fortifies Millennium’s security posture by providing best-in-class security threat and data protection
• Information Management and data governance enforce and execute Millennium’s policies, standards, procedures, and work instructions
• Microsoft Endpoint Manager (Intune) executes Millennium’s device provisioning policies and ensures that field devices are securely connected and consistently configured
• Microsoft Defender ATP provides endpoint security capabilities around threat detection, protection, and response
• Power Automate enhances business productivity by integrating multiple line of business SaaS offerings and automating previously time-intensive processes such as audit reporting

Results

Circle T helped Millennium realize its vision of a modern digital workplace and transformed the way knowledge and insights are shared within the organization. The solution provides Millennium with digital resilience, enabling Millennium to respond to the COVID-19 crisis by safeguarding its operations. The platform allows Millennium to continue investing in strategic priorities to build ongoing resilience by expanding and strengthening its digital platform and focusing on automation.

Results at a glance:

• 30% reduction in IT costs from decommissioning multiple on-premise data centers, aging SharePoint farms, email, and file servers
• Cultivating an inclusive company culture through employee connection and engagement
• Significant productivity benefits to staff across the organization with 100% of the business now using Microsoft Teams as its primary collaboration tool, enabling vital access to data and content