Teamwork ensures a successful migration at FOAMGLAS® to Owens Corning

Following their takeover by US multinational Owens Corning, the IT team at Pittsburgh Corning Europe, famous for its innovative FOAMGLAS® insulation material, were facing a challenge. Ctac helped the company, originally founded in Belgium, to migrate smoothly to the American parent company’s system, while keeping the existing SAP environment up and running.

In 2017, Pittsburgh Corning Europe was acquired by US-based Owens Corning, a leading global manufacturer of sustainable building materials. Pittsburgh Corning Europe’s message to Ctac was clear at the time: the collaboration will come to an end. Once the migration to Owens Corning’s SAP system is complete, our paths will separate. Everything will then be taken over by the Owens Corning team in the United States. “In a normal project, at that point you’d gradually start reducing the scale of cooperation”, says Eric Op de Beeck, IT Manager at this manufacturer of high-quality insulation materials. In the event, the opposite happened; the collaboration with Ctac expanded. With one goal: ensuring the migration ran smoothly and the existing systems remained operational.

Infrastructure and applications

“After the acquisition, we looked at how we could integrate FOAMGLAS®, with its branches in the United States, Europe and China, into the Owens Corning global platform. This involved both infrastructure and applications. We started by integrating the infrastructure, and then looked at the applications. The most important application was SAP, and of course this put Ctac even more firmly in the spotlight”, says Op de Beeck, who started in 2016 as IT Manager at Pittsburgh Corning Europe. The company had already been working with Ctac for eight years, which had provided them with basic and application support.

“Ctac was able to solve the puzzle”

In the run-up to the integration of the two organisations, the IT team worked on twin tracks. On the one hand, the migration was being prepared, and on the other hand, it was important to keep the existing SAP environment up and running. Initially, the intention was to migrate to the Owens Corning environment in 2019. This wasn’t feasible, however, partly because Owens Corning had other migrations to complete first, and partly because of travel restrictions due to Covid. The migration was therefore postponed to 1 May 2023.

According to Op de Beeck, the lengthy postponement by several years meant a lot of flexibility was needed. The project’s finish line is now in sight, and he is extremely grateful to Ctac. “Without Ctac, it wouldn’t have been possible. That much is very clear”, he says. “We consciously chose a partnership with Ctac because we had been working with them with great satisfaction for years. They have the right expertise in SAP as well as in our environment and people.”

He commented that this expertise was indispensable to the migration process. “Ctac and Owens Corning managed to put the pieces of the puzzle together. They know what’s needed and why things are set up in a certain way. They had an important dog in the race in the ‘future’ situation.” Our Ctac colleagues were able to work independently on the whole, and to brainstorm at a high level. “We didn’t have to hold their hands; quite the opposite. We got them talking to our new Owens Corning’s colleagues in the United States with every confidence. This meant things could quickly be crossed off the list. Without their experience, their people and their knowledge, this wouldn’t have been possible.”

Bubble

What remains, once the migration is complete, is another special project. “As a final task, Ctac is setting up a bubble for us to split off the current, old SAP environment into an isolated environment, which we can then archive at Owens Corning’s headquarters in Toledo”, says Op de Beeck. “After the migration, our data centre will no longer exist, and we need to make sure that this data is stored securely.”

Once this is done, a new chapter begins. “It feels great to have the finishing line in sight. We’re proud of what has been achieved and, although there will undoubtedly still be some things to fine-tune after 1 May, we’re confident that things will go well. We’ll resolve whatever challenges we run into. Together with Ctac.”