Kubota Manufacturing of America

GDC Successfully Upgrades SharePoint for Manufacturer

Industry: Manufacturing
Size: 1,000+ Employees
Location: Gainesville, Georgia

Established in 1988, Kubota Manufacturing of America Corporation (Kubota) is headquartered in Gainesville, Georgia, a thriving industrial and agricultural community. Kubota markets its products not only in the United States but also exports them to Canada, Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Japan. Similarly, Kubota has expanded its procurement activities beyond North America to include sources in Canada, Mexico, India, Europe, South America and Asia.

Business Need

Kubota was using SharePoint 2010. The extended support for the program was scheduled to stop in April 2021. To maintain their supported technology, Kubota needed to migrate to a recent version of SharePoint. Additionally, Kubota wanted to keep the program on premise instead of migrating to a cloud-based server.

Partnering with GDC IT Solutions (GDC) for this project was an easy choice. GDC and Kubota have worked together on a number of past projects including custom web app development and iSeries operations support.

The Solution

GDC was hired to upgrade SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2019. Microsoft SharePoint is primarily known for document storage but with each evolution, Microsoft has expanded SharePoint capabilities.

After initial conversations, GDC suggested the use of ShareGate, an application that allows a progressive migration and implements regular updates for a client updating to a new version of SharePoint. This allows for greater control over the migration with minimal impact on operations.

Pre-Migration Planning. GDC used the Source Analysis Report to provide a detailed inventory of the Kubota source environment, including its size and total number of sites, site collections and workflows. GDC analyzed the environment to quantify and plan the migration with the least possible impact on business operations. The report allowed us to pinpoint potential issues to know exactly what to fix before initiating the migration.

Migration Customizations. Using ShareGate, GDC simulated the migration in advance of production changes for ultimate peace of mind. GDC migrated incrementally, updated links, configured mappings, targeted content to migrate by date, and flattened folder hierarchy.

Migration Process. The migration was implemented in a five-phase process developed through GDC’s years of expertise working with the system:

• Phase 1: Build out pre-production environments and complete test migration.
• Phase 2: Review and update plan, validate resolutions from assessment.
• Phase 3: Build out production SharePoint 2019 environments.
• Phase 4: Migrate content to SharePoint 2019 production environment.
• Phase 5: Post Go-Live Support and project closure.

GDC managed the migration, fixed improperly migrated content, resolved issues with draft content, performed progressive migrations as needed, and resolved other misc. issues for Kubota’s SharePoint site. ShareGate copied all metadata, content, and assets, replicating it into the new version, providing an avenue to save time by copying data without having to repeat through multiple versions.

Post Migration and Go-Live. After the migration and publishing, GDC provided post, go-live support, using granular reports to fill the gaps, edit metadata in bulk, correct links, and make sure the destination environment met Kubota’s final requirements.

The Process Flow

The Results

GDC completed a successful migration and upgrade of SharePoint for Kubota. Throughout the five-month Agile project, our SharePoint and Agile project management experts had full control over the migration effort using ShareGate with minimal impact on Kubota’s daily operations. Our process of design and implementation using best practices paved the way for making future implementations and maintenance much easier in the long term. Through the streamlined upgrade, GDC was able to offer Kubota advanced features which can drastically reduce overhead expenses through the modernization of operational processes within an agile framework.