Royal BAM Group: Centralized M365 Governance at Scale

Challenge

Royal BAM Group, one of Europe’s largest construction companies, operates across multiple countries with 21,000 Microsoft 365 users. The IT team managed tenant governance through a patchwork of PowerShell scripts, manual spreadsheet tracking, and native Microsoft 365 admin center reports. This approach consumed significant admin hours every week and still left gaps in license visibility, storage monitoring, and compliance oversight.

The company faced three specific problems. First, license allocation across the organization was opaque, unused licenses sat assigned to inactive accounts while new projects requested additional seats. Second, SharePoint storage was growing at an unsustainable rate, with no clear picture of which sites drove the most consumption. Third, BAM needed to support tenant carveout projects as business units were restructured, requiring precise data on which resources belonged to which organizational entities.

Solution

BAM deployed Rencore Governance as a centralized platform to replace fragmented manual processes. The platform connected to BAM’s Microsoft 365 tenant and provided a single view of license usage, storage consumption, and compliance posture across the entire organization.

For license optimization, Rencore identified unused and underutilized licenses across all 21,000 users, enabling the IT team to reclaim seats and right-size allocations. For storage management, Rencore surfaced the sites and libraries driving the highest growth, allowing the team to enforce retention policies and archive inactive content before storage costs escalated further. For the tenant carveout projects, Rencore provided the detailed inventory data needed to scope which users, groups, and resources belonged to each business unit.

The deployment replaced hours of weekly PowerShell scripting and manual data gathering with automated reports and policy monitoring.

Results

Within the first year, BAM achieved a 15% reduction in annual Microsoft 365 licensing costs by reclaiming unused licenses and right-sizing seat allocations. SharePoint storage growth dropped by 33% through targeted retention enforcement and proactive monitoring. The IT admin team recovered an estimated EUR 80,000 per year in labor costs previously spent on manual governance tasks, freeing them to focus on higher-value infrastructure work. Governance shifted from periodic manual audits to continuous, automated monitoring.