There are not many companies in Spain with 40,000 workers. And only one in which 42% of that workforce is made up of disabled people: this is the originality and reason for existence of Ilunion, the ONCE business group. Otherwise, it is a company like others: it manages six lines of business that provide services to clients, including 30 hotels, 44 industrial laundries, cleaning and security, contact centers and a social and health branch. And of the 40,000 employees, almost 7,000 already have a digitalized workplace. With this profile, it is natural that digitalization and accessibility are strategic pillars.
Ilunion assumes a mission: to create job opportunities for people with disabilities (not just visual) who find it difficult to enter the world of work. Consequently, they must be equipped with accessible information technologies. A classic example is the employee experience platform, developed jointly with SuccessFactor, the human resources application of the German company SAP.
“I joined the company in 2019,” says Juan Manuel Caballero, director of information systems at Ilunion, “and I was able to see firsthand the frustration among many employees due to the insufficiencies of digitalization, which prevented them from doing certain things and streamlining their work. We made a plan, but the pandemic soon hit. It's hard to say it like that, but it was very good for us to do as much as we could during those seven months working remotely. Ilunion decided not to stop the IT investments it had budgeted, and now we are reaping the rewards.”
Some lines of business were more mature than others, it was logical - he remembers -, so the transformation was planned as a series of transversal projects that affected the businesses and other verticals that delved into the productive part of each one. The fundamental thing about the strategic plan designed for three years was the migration to the cloud: “In 2019, 98% of the systems were local and their epicenter was the ECC (resource management) software from SAP. It had to be migrated to HEC, from the same provider, and was used to contractually pivot towards the software-as-a-service model.”
Necessarily, a migration is complex: it affects people, businesses, systems, perimeters, security... Everything has to be rethought. Ilunion's was done in five successive waves, "from system to system, in order of criticality." As a premise, the strategic plan contemplated working with different clouds and this was done. For example, SAP systems, already converted for the cloud, are hosted on Google Cloud because it was the first of the large providers that decided to install a data center in Spain and collaborated closely with Ilunion and SAP in that task. As for office automation, based on Microsoft software, it made sense to entrust it to its cloud, Azure. For its part, the management of the hotels is carried out in the Oracle cloud. “The paradigm of the cloud model has changed radically,” says Caballero, “so that you can have your uploads almost anywhere with the only exception of latency (minimum response time), a crucial detail for the Internet of Things in our laundries”.
Have costs gone down? Is it a mandatory question? “It was not the main objective. If I look system by system, the costs are the same or reduced a little, but the advantage is in the speed at which we can move a load to the cloud – I can start a machine in four minutes, before I had to order it and wait – by changing our paper. This department, previously reactive to support needs, has become proactive in the transformation,” he concludes.
