How Titan Machinery Europe replaced an in-house drive-mapping tool at scale
CASE STUDY · AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT
Titan Machinery Europe (around 800 employees across Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine, part of the largest CNH Industrial dealership group in the world) had built its own solution years ago to map SharePoint document libraries as drives inside Windows Explorer. It worked. Then ongoing changes to Windows, Microsoft 365 and authentication standards started demanding more and more internal engineering effort just to keep the tool running. Cloud Drive Mapper replaced the in-house solution on a one-to-one basis, went live across the European estate in around two months, and cut SharePoint-related support tickets by an estimated 80-85%.
The biggest improvement has been the significant reduction in internal maintenance and support effort. We no longer need to continuously adapt our own solution to changes introduced by Microsoft. Cloud Drive Mapper requires very little administration and, in day-to-day operations, it simply works.
Roman Badevic, Head of IT Europe, Titan Machinery Europe
The challenge: an internal solution that kept needing patching
SharePoint is Titan Machinery Europe's primary file storage platform. Years earlier, when the group had first moved workflows onto SharePoint, the internal IT team had built their own tool to present SharePoint document libraries as drives in Windows Explorer. Users kept the drive-letter experience they were used to. The custom tool worked well at day one.
Then Microsoft's platform kept evolving. Every change to Windows, Microsoft 365, authentication standards or the surrounding ecosystem meant another round of updates to the in-house solution to keep it working. What had started as a clean bit of engineering became an ongoing maintenance burden. Over the years, more and more internal effort was going into keeping the custom tool current, and the ROI on maintaining it privately kept shrinking.
Any replacement had to meet three things at once. It had to replace the in-house tool on a one-to-one basis so users did not have to change how they worked. It had to reduce the ongoing maintenance load, not add to it. And it had to work across a multi-country, multi-entity Microsoft 365 estate with different SharePoint sites for different countries, regions, entities and user groups.
The solution: one-to-one replacement, delivered in weeks
Cloud Drive Mapper mapped one-to-one onto what the in-house solution had been doing. Users continued to access their SharePoint files through Windows Explorer, from the same drive letters, without any change to how they worked. The SharePoint sites Titan Machinery had structured around countries, regions, entities and user groups were mapped through CDM's central administration.
The initial test scope was configured and working in less than 15 days. The full rollout across the European estate (Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine) took approximately two months, and Roman is explicit that the timeline was driven by multi-country coordination rather than technical complexity with CDM itself.
Our main expectation was that Cloud Drive Mapper could replace our existing custom-built solution on a one-to-one basis. SharePoint is our primary file storage platform, so it was important that employees could continue accessing their SharePoint files conveniently through Windows Explorer without changing the way they work.
Roman Badevic, Head of IT Europe, Titan Machinery Europe
Results: an 80-85% drop in SharePoint support tickets
The internal maintenance burden that had driven the change went away. Titan Machinery's IT team no longer needs to continuously adapt an in-house solution to keep pace with Microsoft's platform. In day-to-day operations, CDM is largely invisible: users open files, save files, and get on with their work.
The most measurable outcome is the support-ticket load. Since implementing CDM, Titan Machinery has seen an estimated 80-85% reduction in support tickets related to drive mapping and SharePoint file access. That reduces support cost directly and frees engineering time that had previously been spent maintaining the custom solution.
Users experience significantly fewer issues, and the solution has proven to be much more reliable than our previous implementation. For most employees, Cloud Drive Mapper simply works in the background, which is ultimately what we want from this type of solution.
Roman Badevic, Head of IT Europe, Titan Machinery Europe
Performance and reliability have held up under Titan Machinery's scale. When issues have come up, Roman singles out the CDM support team for fast, solution-driven responses.
An honest note on SharePoint at scale
Roman is careful to frame CDM inside a broader point about SharePoint. It is worth quoting him at length, because it reflects the reality of moving a large business estate onto Microsoft 365 storage rather than a marketing pitch:
Cloud Drive Mapper does not remove the underlying limitations of SharePoint. Organizations moving from traditional file servers should be aware of differences and limitations around areas such as file and item quantities, path lengths, file types, image handling, and SharePoint structure. If an organization understands and designs around these SharePoint limitations, Cloud Drive Mapper is an excellent solution for making SharePoint practical and user-friendly in day-to-day business operations.
Roman Badevic, Head of IT Europe, Titan Machinery Europe
CDM does not paper over SharePoint's architectural limits. It makes SharePoint usable as the primary file storage platform for a large distributed business, when the SharePoint estate itself has been designed with those limits in mind.
Recommendation
Cloud Drive Mapper allows us to provide the simplicity of a traditional mapped drive while benefiting from the collaboration, scalability, and cloud capabilities of SharePoint.
Roman Badevic, Head of IT Europe, Titan Machinery Europe
About Titan Machinery Europe
Titan Machinery is one of the world's largest agricultural and construction equipment dealer organisations and the largest CNH Industrial dealership worldwide. The group has a significant international footprint, with operations across the United States, Australia and Europe. Within Europe, Titan Machinery operates in Austria, Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine, running an extensive dealership and branch network covering equipment sales, after-sales services (parts and service), precision farming solutions, and supporting corporate functions.
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