When people transit through Oslo's sleek international airport, admire contemporary art at Shenzhen’s Art Museum, or marvel at the vaults of the historic Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, it is one company that put these landmarks on scene.
Zumtobel Group has transformed architectural lighting into an art form that blends technological innovation with beautiful design. Its three brands, Zumtobel, Thorn and Tridonic, have become synonymous with lighting excellence.
Behind every installation lies the Zumtobel Group's meticulous attention to manufacturing quality and reliability—pillars that have elevated the company to its position of illuminating some of the world's most treasured spaces.
Zumtobel Group has built much of its operational foundation on SAP® Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, which support functions from the back office right through to the factory floor. For years, the company ran SAP® applications on an on-premise infrastructure. But when SAP® announced a strategic shift requiring customers to migrate to cloud, Zumtobel Group decided to leave behind its familiar landscape and embrace a new paradigm.
SAP® applications are naturally the central system for us. It directly impacts our ability to produce, sell and deliver our products. Moving to the cloud was imperative, not only for aligning with the SAP® technology roadmap, but ensuring that our organization remained future proof.”
Turning tech requirements into business transformation opportunities
With the clock ticking down to the 2027 SAP® technology deadline for transitioning to cloud, the Zumtobel Group did more than comply—it seized the opportunity for digital reinvention. To guide its transformation, the lighting company set three strategic imperatives.
The first was creating more intuitive workflows to remove redundancies and complexity, providing employees with more agile ways of working.
Second was building unshakable system resilience, recognizing that in today's digital economy, even moments of downtime translate directly to revenue loss.
Finally, elevating operational efficiency would allow the company to bring its products to market faster and at lower cost, protecting its profits and competitive edge.
Leaving legacy behind
As the Zumtobel Group mapped out its migration, it became clear that the company needed to take an extra step on the way to cloud. With legacy systems at their limits of performance and capacity, Zumtobel Group recognized that its first priority lay in modernizing and stabilizing its infrastructure. Only then would it have the reliable base it needed to make the leap to a cloud-based environment.
However, the company quickly recognized the prohibitive costs associated with procuring, operating and managing a new on-premises infrastructure, especially one capable of meeting extremely high redundancy requirements for peak usage and disaster recovery scenarios.
Relying on a strategic partner illuminated the path to migration
Rather than shouldering the substantial capital investment of an all-new IT infrastructure, together, Zumtobel Group and strategic partner, Kyndryl, performed a lift-and-shift of SAP® ERP applications from the company’s main data center in Dornbirn to Kyndryl's state-of-the-art managed facilities in Vienna.
Frantz, notes: “Letting go of systems that you’ve always managed yourself isn’t easy. But Kyndryl made the transition as smooth as possible by creating an environment where we felt valued and understood. The migration itself went incredibly well, we were able to seamlessly exit our data center while preparing for the broader transition from SAP® ERP to SAP S/4HANA® software.”
Zumtobel Group has been working with a specialized partner for the SAP S/4HANA® software migration, while Kyndryl maintains its crucial infrastructure role.
"Kyndryl has sole responsibility for ensuring that our infrastructure foundation operates flawlessly," explains Frantz. "This has been invaluable, giving us an expertly prepared, high-performance platform from which we can make the transition to the cloud more easily and confidently."
Today, Zumtobel Group enjoys a comprehensive managed services relationship with Kyndryl, who delivers end-to-end IT infrastructure support, including round-the-clock monitoring and maintenance. With Kyndryl taking care of day-to-day infrastructure management, Zumtobel Group has been able to focus on completing a smooth migration to the cloud. The company has already migrated two business units to SAP S4/HANA® applications and is now preparing for the final and most ambitious phase of the project: bringing its three lighting brands onto cloud.
What progress looks like
Now that some of its most mission-critical systems are in Kyndryl’s expert hands, Zumtobel Group benefits from exceptional availability, stability and performance. Crucially, the company has made these gains with much lower cost and effort than it would have been able to achieve with an on-premises deployment.
"Kyndryl is committed to building strong strategic partnerships and creating innovative solutions that provide real value to the Zumtobel Group. Our trusted, long-standing collaboration with the lighting company enables us to support future projects, such as migrating the group’s lighting brands to the cloud, which is crucial for contributing to their customers' success," said Stefan Pichler, Customer Partner at Kyndryl.
With its move to cloud, the company is building a future-proof platform to guide its next era of operations—and is already seeing the impact of this shift. Zumtobel Group has been able to streamline business processes, reducing complexity.
By optimizing workflows and eliminating redundancies, the company is on track to achieve roughly 25% cost savings while simultaneously improving productivity across departments.
The human element of this transformation cannot be overlooked either. Employees throughout the group report improved experiences with the new SAP® applications. Decision-makers at all levels have access to more powerful and intuitive analytical tools, allowing them to gain better insight into operations and strengthen Zumtobel Group’s position as a leading provider of innovative lighting solutions.
“Kyndryl has been more than a managed service provider. They have been a strategic IT innovation partner which allows us to focus our resources where they matter most: developing world-class luminaires. The Zumtobel Group can maintain its legacy of lighting excellence while Kyndryl ensures the technology foundation underpinning it all remains rock-solid,“ said Frantz.
Marcus Frantz, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Zumtobel Group
About the Zumtobel Group
Based in Dornbirn, Austria, the Zumtobel Group has been designing, manufacturing and selling high-quality lighting systems and components with 5,300 employees and 10 plants across three continents.