The Rentokil Initial and Terminix integration not only marked a pivotal moment in the pest control industry but also reshaped the landscape in terms of workforce scale. With this strategic move, Rentokil Initial significantly expanded its global team, incorporating the skilled and experienced personnel from Terminix.

As a result of the acquisition, the workforce was divided across communication platforms. Rentokil Initial is predominantly a Google house using Google Workspace to communicate effectively across their workforce. Terminix, however, was operating primarily with Microsoft Office 365.

Chris explained, ‘We wanted to create one business, one culture and with everyone focused on the goal of a successful integration, and so it was essential that we moved to one system to communicate and collaborate quickly and efficiently.’

Rentokil Initial had a clear objective of migrating Terminix’s mail, calendars and chat functions from O365 to Google in line with the rest of the organisation.

Having an existing relationship, Chris and his team approached Netpremacy about the project.

For such a large-scale project, Netpremacy wanted to understand the scale of the data and have a clear understanding of the business functions in order to execute the project efficiently and with minimal business disruption.

Netpremacy orchestrated a series of 12 workshops to grasp the distinct working environments of both Rentokil Initial and Terminix. These workshops covered a high-level overview of all work streams: Project Delivery, Technical Deployment and Change Management and provided a crucial foundation for the division of a tailored migration strategy.

With a particular focus on streamlining business communications, the decision was made to conduct a portion of these workshops in person at Terminix HQ in the US. In doing so, this allowed Netpremacy to gain a universal view of the end-user's use cases, while engaging with key stakeholders from both businesses, working as one entity to reach the end goal.

‘From those workshops…we were able to take some prerequisites and make a number of decisions, even though we had some decisions still to make. That was the baseline and the foundation, and having new colleagues working together closely for those days was fantastic and actually set the bedrock for what was then going to be successful,’ Chris explained.

Adopting a new platform is a significant change for any team, and whilst the Terminix team were open-minded about the new approach, preparing end users for the change was an essential part of the project scope.

Netpremacy's dedicated Change Management team delivered numerous training sessions and provided a range of comms material to help the users understand and embrace the new technology.

From the planning phase, the agreed approaches were then configured and tested, all end-users were divided into pre-identified go-live groups, including core IT, early adopters and critical users. These groups were used to stagger go-lives to ensure minimal disruption and maximum efficiency.

Once the main user groups were migrated successfully, Netpremacy worked with the team to migrate 750 shared mailboxes and ran final reports to identify and migrate any remaining data.

As a result of the migration, Rentokil Initial:

Successfully migrated 13,500 users to Google, creating uniformity across the newly expanded business.

Significantly improved communications within the organisation, adopting a culture of collaboration and creating a streamlined business environment.

Created one unified workforce, with all colleagues working with the same email, chat and calendar platform.

Now that colleagues across the business can easily communicate and collaborate on one secure platform, Rentokil Initial is embarking on phase 2 of its project: file migration.

Rentokil Initial wants the same seamlessness of communication to be transferred to file sharing and drive management within Google Drive. Starting with a deep analysis of SharePoint and OneDrive environments, with an end goal of migrating File Servers to Google Drive and managing permissions in the most secure and effective way for the expanding business.