Clean break:
How Resideo decoupled core IT from parent Honeywell

No. of months the Resideo team had to stand up IT for a company of 13,000 from scratch

Scope, scale, schedule

“What we’re talking about here is nothing less than standing up IT for a whole new company of 13,000 people in just 24 months — but only after extracting it from a situation where it was very co-mingled with an even bigger company.”

The first step in figuring that out was the establishment of a robust ‘separation management’ office. “Even after we were separate companies, partnership and collaboration continued with Honeywell,” says Wendy Smith*, Senior IT Lead at Resideo.

“That was so important to ensure they knew what we would need from them during the separation, what our journey looked like and our mutual expectations. But it was also key in our own internal coordination, at a time when we were determined to create a new, world-class IT organization, one that had the freedom to embrace innovation, to do things differently.”

What that equated to, Vasudev adds, was “a ton of RFPs [requests for proposals], work on vendor and partner selection and on finding all the right price points. We were running in a frenzy, just trying to stand ourselves up as a fully formed IT capability.”

75
No. of applications migrated by the Resideo IT team to AWS cloud in under four months

Cloud shift

One of the earliest decisions made was opting to shift a good portion of the application portfolio to the cloud, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the primary landing point — a clear departure from Honeywell’s history of largely on-premise IT. The migration involved some 75 applications in total, including engineering apps and back-office apps for HR and finance — all shifted to AWS in three to four months, according to Vasudev. “It has worked well and been growing since then in terms of the elements we’re putting in the cloud. It set a direction of travel for us."

A deviation to that route, however, is the Resideo SAP system, used to run core manufacturing and supply chain processes. This was rehosted in a data center based in New York, however, SAP disaster recovery is fully architected on AWS.

In order to provide Resideo’s workforce with an IT helpdesk, the company chose Fujitsu, not just as the outsourced provider of IT services to employees, but also as its consulting partner on the implementation of an ITSM platform from ServiceNow. As planned, it was the first new service to go live (in August 2019) after a build-time of less than six months. “We knew that this had to be ‘step one’ because once ServiceNow was in place, all other apps and services could follow,” Vasudev explains.

In order to achieve a swift implementation, Resideo and Fujitsu stuck closely to an ‘out-of-the-box’ implementation, with minimal customization beyond what was required for compliance purposes in areas such as GDPR data governance. Having Fujitsu as both the service desk provider and implementation partner was another big help.

Finally, ServiceNow was implemented with a strong focus on self-service capabilities for employees. “That enabled not only a faster deployment but also enabled us to become operationally effective extremely fast, at a time when employees were dealing with a new IT environment,” Vasudev says. (Read more about how ServiceNow and Fujitsu helped Resideo cut its ITSM costs by 30%.)

COVID curveball

The strategy was all going to plan until early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit globally. This had serious repercussions on one of the final but critical elements of the separation: the roll-out of a new implementation of Microsoft Windows to the more than 10,000 devices used by its global workforce. “We spent weeks developing, involving staff in our customer-facing stores, our manufacturing plants, our traditional offices,” says Smith. “We’d set up major hubs for the roll-out of hardware and software in the US, the UK, Mexico, the Czech Republic and India — and then suddenly, all our perfect plans just didn’t fit the reality we were facing.”

But there could be no change to the project timeline nor the separation date that the Resideo IT team had to hit. After a major rethink, involving teams from health and safety and HR, many devices were shipped to users who were now working remotely and updated to the new Windows image over the VPN. Call centers were set up to provide users with pre- and post-deployment guidance so they could handle this themselves. Where factories were still up and running, in-person visits were made to perform ‘hot swaps’ on devices, so that continuity was assured.

“In many ways, it was an amazing learning experience,” says Vasudev. “I don’t think we will ever have another project experience like this again — not that we would want one!”

‘Pulling the ripcord’

Despite the headaches, by the time the late October cut-off date arrived the team gathered in a command center established to push the switchover over the finish line, says Mathews. This, after all their work, was the date on which access to Honeywell systems would be deactivated — for good. “There was a feeling of, ‘Let’s just get this done, let’s pull the ripcord,’” he says.

Underpinning any sense of trepidation, however, was a quiet confidence, says Vasudev. “We had talked and talked, planned and planned for every possible scenario. We felt pretty sure we’d covered all the bases — but there was still a fear of the unknown unknowns. So the point of the command center was to have a full team on hand if people had any issues and to tackle them fast.”

In the end, the switchover went smoothly. “It was nerve-wracking at times. It’s been such a huge amount of work, for us and for our partners,” says Vasudev. “The effort has been phenomenal, but so have the results — and we’ve managed to do all this with minimal disruption. So, yes, we’ve certainly been celebrating.”

But there has been little time for the jubilant Resideo IT team to relax; it is already moving on to the next stage of the technology roadmap. A big priority now is to push the self-service further, so that Resideo employees can solve even more of their IT problems, explains Vasudev. This will be achieved through the application of the predictive intelligence and bot-building capabilities within ServiceNow.

“The great job the team has done to bring this project home and get all of our people equipped for the challenge ahead is a powerful statement of what’s possible.”

Other items on the agenda include consolidating the various collaboration and ERP platforms used by the workforce. Network transformation is also a major area of focus going forward.

But if the IT effort has been huge, so has been the overall shift in mindset. The fresh start provided by the switchover will be a powerful reinforcement that Resideo is now fully in charge of its own destiny, says CIO Mathews.

“As leaders, we’re always trying to reinforce this idea that, as Resideo, we have to think differently. That’s harder than it seems because that attitude needs to be everywhere, not just at the top. It’s challenging for people to work in new ways but the great job the team has done to bring this project home and get all of our people equipped for the challenge ahead is a powerful statement of what’s possible and what our future, as Resideo, looks like,” he says.

* Update: Wendy Smith took on a new role in August 2021 as IT Director, Operational Excellence at international defense, security and aerospace company BAE Systems Inc; and in September 2021 Aruna Vasudev became Vice President, Business Systems at global human capital management software company Ceridian.

Watch Resideo’s Aruna Vasudev* and Wendy Smith* describe Resideo’s inspiring IT journey on a Fujitsu CxO Speaks webinar

Watch the webinar