The Challenge
A US-headquartered manufacturer needed to modernise IT across four Asia sites — three manufacturing plants in Mainland China plus a regional corporate office — in a single coordinated programme:
- Migrate all on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.
- Move China-based users onto a thin-client VDI (virtual desktop) platform.
- Redesign and rebuild the network and IT infrastructure end to end.
- Stand up a new regional IT support model across all four sites.
- Transition away from the incumbent IT provider without disrupting operations.
The structural problem underneath all of it: a 12-hour time difference between US headquarters and the Asia sites meant head office had almost no real-time visibility of what was happening on the ground — and no local team it trusted to own the programme.
The Solution
PTS took complete ownership of the programme rather than acting as one more vendor to coordinate. Working across the corporate office and the China plants, we:
- Planned and executed the legacy-to-cloud migration, sequencing workloads so manufacturing systems stayed up throughout.
- Deployed the VDI platform for China-based users — the right architecture for sites where data residency, bandwidth and device management make traditional desktops painful.
- Redesigned and rebuilt the network and infrastructure across all four sites.
- Established the new regional IT support model, with local engineers and a helpdesk operating in the client’s languages and time zones.
- Managed local vendors and stakeholders directly, closing the visibility gap for the US team with structured reporting they could act on from the other side of the world.
The handover from the previous provider was managed as part of the programme — service continuity first, then transformation.
The Outcome
The legacy infrastructure was retired to the cloud, the VDI rollout landed without any measurable impact on user productivity, and the network rebuild completed without manufacturing downtime — the constraint that mattered most to the business. The new regional support model was operational within weeks of engagement, and the provider transition was seamless from the user side.
US headquarters went from managing Asia IT blind across 12 time zones to governing a single accountable partner on the ground.
Why it worked
Programmes like this usually fail in the seams — between the cloud vendor, the network contractor, the VDI integrator and the incumbent support provider. Putting one team across all of it, with engineers physically in the region and reporting built for a head office far away, removed the seams entirely.
This programme was delivered by the PTS group across Mainland China and the wider region; the same regional capability backs PTS Managed Services in Singapore for clients running multi-site operations across APAC.
Related services: Microsoft 365 & cloud, managed IT services and IT support. Related case study: extending global IT support into Asia.