Customer Success Story:
Röchling Automotive uses managed file transfer to share large files worldwide

The Röchling (Roechling) Group is one of the world’s leading companies with a broad technology base that extends to all areas of plastics processing. Its automotive division, Röchling Automotive SE & Co. KG, manufactures systems and components made of polymer materials and natural fiber plastic composites for the automotive industry. With more than 8,500 employees, the company operates globally with 36 locations spread over four continents.

Challenge

As a leader in the automotive manufacturing industry, Röchling Automotive has thousands of employees who collaborate from offices that span across four continents with the main locations in Europe, United States, China and Brazil. Its business processes require employees to share large files (e.g., CAD files up to 5GB) across multiple geographies with customers, partners and vendors.

For ad-hoc file transfers, Röchling Automotive was using different file sharing solutions, which started to become burdensome for employees to get work done efficiently and for IT to manage. Some of the top problems Röchling faced with its file sharing solutions were

• IBM Domino email server burdened by large attachment transfers and storage.
• Slow file transfers.
• No audit of file activities.
• Unsanctioned file sharing services being used.
• Issues passing data through the Chinese firewall.

Objectives

Röchling searched for a secure file transfer solution to meet their requirements:

• Integrate with its existing IBM Domino server.
• Satisfy its high speed requirements.
• Streamline global collaboration.
• Scalability to support its thousands of employees, customers, vendors and partners.

Solution

In order to fulfill its unique requirements, Röchling Automotive chose the Thru Platform with its IBM Notes integration based on treeMailS technology.

With implementation of Thru, Röchling Automotive’s thousands of users can now securely send files of any size from their existing IBM Notes clients without the email client ever being blocked. IT administrators can set policies for the Thru for IBM Notes integration to require file transfers to be sent with Thru when attachments are over a specific file size. Administrators can also set several other custom policies, such as setting the maximum lifetime for a file package or making it mandatory to send using Thru from specific file directories. After file transfers are sent, all transactions are recorded in Thru and can be easily analyzed and reported by administrators.

To solve problems with slow file transfer speeds and issues passing data through China, Röchling Automotive now uses Thru’s global network of data centers. To improve collaboration in shared folders over long distances, Thru mirroring technology is used to automatically mirror folders to other data centers and provide faster access to data.

Results

Now that Röchling Automotive is using Thru as its single global file sharing service, significant benefits are being realized that were not possible with its previous solution, including

• 20x faster file/folder uploads and downloads – Thru’s file transfer service allows users to now send, upload and download content faster from anywhere.
• Fast deployment and easy administration – A significant advantage Röchling Automotive experienced with Thru for IBM Notes based on treeMailS was how fast the solution could be deployed to thousands of users and the ease of administration (e.g., user management, viewing audit logs, etc.) Since the solution is seamlessly integrated in the backend of IBM Notes, administrators did not have to spend hours training end users to use the new solution.
• Cost savings and performance improvements – By removing the burden of large file attachments from its IBM Domino environment, the company cut costs on Domino storage and improved server performance.
• Improved security and productivity – By integrating Thru to IBM Notes, Röchling Automotive’s users now transfer data more securely with features like encryption and antivirus scanning that is performed on all file transfers and cloud storage.
• IT administrators now have greater visibility and control – The Thru Audit tool and access controls has enabled administrators to have greater visibility and control of company data and can run reports on all actions in Thru.