Kohler

Kohler is a global leader in kitchen and bath products, cabinetry, tile, and lighting. Kohler is also a global manufacturer of engines and power generation systems. To round out its diverse portfolio, Kohler operates award-winning hospitality and world-class golf at Destination Kohler and Destination St. Andrews.

Challenges

Kohler has large operations in places like China and Italy where the pandemic hit early. As the pandemic spread across the globe, the company needed to tailor its response to each country. However, its primary focus is the health and well-being of its associates and families, along with the customers it serves every day. It led the company to either partially or fully close plants, offices, hotels; reducing and in some cases eliminating travel; and significantly disrupting its traditional ways of working. When the lockdown happened in China, many associates didn’t have their company-owned equipment with them, so they turned to any devices they could find. As Kohler sent associates home to work remotely, they didn’t have enough company-owned equipment to give them.

Initiatives

To protect and manage personal devices that are now being used in the remote workplace, Kohler turned to Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Microsoft Intune to enroll 600 devices a week over an eight-week period during March and April 2020. Today, the entire estate of 6,965 devices is managed by Intune. 

Result

Kohler is also launching Microsoft Information Protection to bring an improved set of security controls to company data shared internally and externally in emails and documents. Microsoft Information Protection uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for authentication, for both internal users and users from other organizations.