Google helps manufacturers keep operations moving in modern times

Posted by Julia Towne, Head of Enterprise Manufacturing

Editor's note: Whether it's in the factory, warehouse or office, manufacturers need to work efficiently to bring their customers what's needed. This week we're focusing on how companies in the manufacturing industry are using Google solutions to work better and stay connected.

Manufacturing has always been shaped by technology, from the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution to the latest robotics on the factory floor. As advances in technology have taken shape, it’s become important for manufacturing companies to manage widespread teams of employees in all corners of the globe and work with vendors and suppliers to serve global customers. There is an added expectation that the industry also needs to keep everyone in sync and effectively and efficiently communicate, collaborate, schedule and track employee and customer activities.

This week we will highlight how a handful of leaders in manufacturing use Google solutions to better focus on their business needs, allowing them to move faster, innovate and collaborate. By relying on new technology, manufacturers are discovering new ways to stay connected across locations, devices and systems. This week you’ll read specific examples from our customers: How one company used Google Apps to cut their meeting times in half; how another used Google Maps to track their best performing sales territory; and how one customer got real-time access to their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) by integrating Google Search Appliance.

Ready to learn more? Check back daily to learn how companies are streamlining processes and “going lean” with Google.

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BDP International Delivers Success with Google Apps

Posted by Jason Bullock, Infrastructure Director, BDP International

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jason Bullock, Infrastructure Director at BDP International, a global transportation company with operations in 115 cities throughout the world and a network of subsidiaries in 122 countries. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Whether it’s moving a tractor to Jakarta, sending a blood pressure monitor to Milan or putting a beer in someone’s hand, at BDP International, we manage logistics for international transportation from start to finish. We run everything from documentation to shipping, making sure all the regulatory requirements are met along the way. We depend on technology to orchestrate the freight logistics and transportation globally on air, land, and sea, so we need to have an email system that’s dependable and tools that are collaborative.

In the past, we used Microsoft Exchange. Maintaining the Exchange environment was costly, and without significant investment our reliability issues would’ve continued. We needed to be able to monitor the mobile devices that connect to our systems and better predict usage patterns. We considered upgrading our on-premise Exchange environment or moving to the cloud on either Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps for Business. The Exchange upgrade was three to four times more expensive than both cloud options and, while Office 365 offered familiar features, the pricing was not within an acceptable cost structure at the time of our evaluation. Google Apps gave us a complete set of tools for a single per-user fee, with the highest reliability and security overall. In April of this year, Google Apps Reseller Cloud Sherpas helped us move our 3,600 employees over to Google Apps.

Although we’ve only been on Apps for a few months, we are already seeing how Google Apps is helping our employees work better together. First, our compliance team is using a Google Site as an internal regulatory information hub, and our VP of Compliance uses the automatic translation feature in Gmail to communicate with our office in Mexico in seconds, without the hassle of finding a translator or leaving the original message. We moved an entire process around event planning from a paper form to a Google Form, which allows our event coordinator to collect and share all the details with the planning staff seamlessly and much faster than before. Finally, we’ve moved off of our company Blackberries onto Android and iOS smartphones with Google Apps. This allows our teams to work faster since everyone can edit and collaborate in Google Drive from anywhere, while giving our IT team better visibility into our network thanks to the mobile management console.

Moving to Google Apps helps our employees view technology as a tool, not an obstacle, and is making us a more nimble company. We can get work done from anywhere while moving around as freely as our cargo. We had talked about making this happen at BDP for a long time, but Google Apps really helped us kickstart the change.

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Making calls from Hangouts — in Gmail and across the web

Posted by Alex Wiesen, Senior Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog)

For those of you who have taken the plunge and are using desktop Hangouts in Gmail, Google+, and the Chrome extension, we've heard loud and clear that you miss the ability to make calls from Gmail, so today, we're happy to announce it's back - and better than before! Even better: calls to the US and Canada are now free from all countries where Hangouts calling is available. And international rates remain super, super low.

Today's launch also improves the desktop calling experience in a number of ways. For example: you can add multiple phone numbers and video participants to the same call; and you can play sound effects (like applause or laughter) with the Google Effects app.

To make a call from Hangouts, just look for the new phone icon in Gmail, or for the new "Call a phone" menu item in Google+ and the Chrome extension. And of course: if you haven't yet tried Hangouts in Gmail, you can always click your profile photo in the chat list and select "Try the new Hangouts."

Making calls from Hangouts is rolling out over the next couple of days. As we’ve said before: Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making and receiving calls is just the beginning. So stay tuned for future updates.

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Google Cloud Platform Powers Minyanville’s Buzz and Banter

Posted by Philip Talamas, CIO of Minyanville Media, Inc

(Cross-posted on the Cloud Platform blog)

Editor's note: Today’s post is from Philip Talamas, CIO of Minyanville Media, Inc., a New York based financial media company. In this post, Philip looks at the benefits his company received from switching from a major public cloud provider to Google Cloud Platform.

At Minyanville Media, our goal is to create branded business content that informs, entertains, and educates all generations about the worlds of business and finance. We designed our premium Buzz & Banter app app to serve this need. The Buzz ran on a competing cloud platform that presented increasing technical challenges as we expanded our customer base and feature set. We wanted a higher performing platform offering a more flexible and deeper feature set; we wanted to be certain we were serving our longtime clients as best as we could.

We consulted our strategic technology partner MediaAgility, and the company advised us to move to Google Cloud Platform. There were two obvious benefits to switching to Google Cloud Platform from our old provider: better reliability and automatic demand-based scaling of the application.

Every day, thousands of investors access our system globally, everywhere from Syracuse to Switzerland. They turn to us for reliable market intelligence and investing ideas. Today's economic uncertainty, coupled with high frequency trading, keeps us on our toes. When a central bank unexpectedly cuts interest rates or a hacked tweet sends markets into a tailspin, seconds matter. We are timely, or we are out of business. It’s as simple as that. Additionally, we serve two major online brokerage firms, which have very high standards for performance and reliability.

Hence, we decided to move Buzz and Banter to the Google Cloud Platform. The improvement and increase in operational speed was drastic. New Buzz, running on Google App Engine, updates content instantaneously -- even before our content management system refreshes to confirm publication. The icing on the cake is that our operating costs are significantly lower than what they were under our old provider.

It’s rare that everyone wins in a technology transition, but that’s exactly what’s been accomplished in our move to Google App Engine. With a better customer experience, lower operating costs, and fewer technological headaches, we only wish that we’d made the switch sooner.

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Hays scouts out the top talent using Google Search Appliance 7.0

Posted by Steve Weston, Group Technology Director at Hays Recruitment

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Steve Weston, Group Technology Director at Hays Recruitment, which is a leading global expert in qualified, professional and skilled recruitment. Hays is an international recruitment agency with 7,800 staff in 245 offices across 33 countries, and has recently expanded into Chile, Colombia and Malaysia. See what other organizations that use the Google Search Appliance have to say.

The recruitment industry is incredibly competitive. Often we win business when our recruitment consultants are able to get the best CVs to our clients faster than our competitors. We rely heavily on our contact databases so that we can match the best candidates to job vacancies.

At Hays, we have over 20 million archived documents and we receive 30,000 new CVs a day. With our old search system, CVs had to be categorised into databases and manually tagged. This held up the process of them entering the system, so our consultants couldn’t access them straight away. Consultants also had to learn specific codes to return the results they wanted, which made the whole process very time consuming.

To fix this problem we chose to implement the Google Search Appliance 7.0 (GSA). Not only does it integrate seamlessly with our internal database, but it also automatically indexes CVs. This means that our recruitment consultants have access to the most up to date candidates at all times and our IT team no longer has to spend hours manually indexing information. Since adopting GSA, our IT team have reduced the time they spend on search by 90%. Our recruitment consultants have also become more efficient because they're able to search across multiple databases in a second's time. Since the GSA is intuitive for a young workforce that is used to seamless consumer search, we also now save hours and thousands of pounds in training every year.

GSA 7.0 gives us the ability to automatically translate CVs and job specs through Google Translate. It is easier for us to compete in global markets, finding the best candidates within a global talent pool who may have previously been missed in the sea of information. For example, roles within the oil and gas industry are typically scattered around the world so it's far easier for us to match relevant candidates now that we have access to the Translate tool.

The global search capabilities of the GSA have also led to a cultural shift. Whereas previously there was a tendency to hoard the best candidates within specific databases, which only select recruitment consultants would be searching, now the candidate database is completely open so no single recruitment agent ‘owns’ the candidates within it.

These benefits have meant we’re now looking to use the GSA across all of our websites globally, making it easier and quicker for job seekers to find the right roles. After rolling this out in the UK and Ireland we found bounce rates have been dramatically reduced, meaning more people are finding the jobs they need from the site.

Google Enterprise’s search technology has fundamentally improved our business. It has put us firmly ahead of our competitors, making us more profitable and allowing us to expand internationally into new markets.

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Datalot Dials In Call Center Success with Chromebooks

Posted by Adam Varga, lead engineer at Datalot

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Adam Varga, lead engineer at Datalot, an online customer acquisition platform. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Customers like hearing a human voice on the other end of the phone line, not a distant, automated recording. At Datalot, we provide cloud-based call centers so that our client's potential customers always encounter a real person when they have a question, need help and make a phone call. We help companies in all lines of business, from health insurance to home improvement, find and connect with their customers because person-to-person interactions are a key ingredient in customer acquisition.

We built our first call centers using Windows computers, but that setup created headaches. I constantly had to adjust settings, restart machines or delete drivers that slowed down the call center computers. I felt like I was spending all my time troubleshooting Windows when I really wanted to focus on developing the software that would make our call centers more efficient. I needed to find a new approach.

Chromebooks were just the ticket. They’re simple for us to set up from anywhere and easy for call center agents to use. The Chrome management console allows for no touch deployment. It lets us lock down user permissions, set up the agent login page as a default homepage, monitor usage, and set the apps and extensions we want our agents to use. Standardizing on a single browser, Chrome, which powers Chromebooks also eliminates any app/browser compatibility surprises.

IT doesn’t need to worry about major problems slowing us down. Google ships the machines to the call center location and we set them up from our Brooklyn headquarters. It takes us very little time to establish a working call center anywhere.

The frequency and quality of Chrome OS updates also make it easy for us to focus on our clients, not our hardware. It’s especially crucial that these OS updates are sent to our machines automatically, so I don’t have to dial up the call center and tell agents to click the “update” button myself.

We’ve just touched the surface of what’s possible with Chromebooks. In the near future, we’ll leverage the User Management API to provide single sign-on for our agents and we hope to power entire call centers using only a Chrome extension. Chromebooks let us get our call centers up-and-running fast, so we know the human element that’s so important to our business isn’t getting lost because of IT issues. We can focus on building out our services and growing the company, and let Chromebooks handle the rest.

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Google Apps helps the cloud become a reality for Imagination

Posted by Tim Smith, Vice President of Digital at Imagination

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Tim Smith, Vice President of Digital at Imagination, a Chicago-based content marketing firm. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Imagination is a content marketing agency that helps companies connect and engage with their target audiences. Businesses like Wells Fargo, General Mills and US Foods turn to us when they want to reach their customers, and we make it happen by creating interesting and engaging content and distributing it across print, digital, broadcast and social media. We place a premium on creating smart strategies and executing on them quickly, so efficient and clear communication matters to us.

Last summer, we realized our technology was getting in the way of our ability to connect and engage with our own customers. We’d recently switched to Microsoft Office 365 as part of a larger company-wide move to the cloud, but ran into a number of problems we couldn’t ignore. Server connection issues prevented us from accessing our documents and Outlook crashes kept us from reading or sending email. Fifty percent of our help desk tickets were for email alone. And whenever a problem arose, we had to hire an expensive Microsoft consultant to fix the issue. When I stopped and realized we had a managed service provider in our office two to three times each week, it struck me: this was not the right IT solution for our agile, quick-moving and collaborative company. So we turned to Google Apps.

Once we had the support of the executive team, I reached out to Cloudbakers, a Google Apps Reseller based near our office in Chicago. They had done numerous deployments for companies like ours before, so they had a well-informed, specific step-by-step plan in place when we first sat down to talk details. They came on-site and ran in-person training for our employees, so everyone felt properly prepared to tackle their work using the new technology without skipping a beat.

Moving to Apps made our IT headache disappear. Help tickets have decreased by 50 percent and we’re on track to save $24,000 per year in help desk and downtime reduction alone. Employees no longer complain about VPN logins or email client configuration; now they can sign on to their account from any device and have everything they need at their fingertips. We don’t encounter hardware issues that make work come grinding to a halt; employees can simply sign into a spare device and instantaneously access their email and files.

Our employees have really embraced Apps, and we've seen a strong trend where teams are adopting new products and features organically. Everyone stores their important documents, presentation and spreadsheets on Google Drive. There’s also been a massive drop in the use of Microsoft Excel in the past few months as people start picking up Google Sheets and Docs. As a data enthusiast, I can’t get enough of the Drive dashboard. It’s revealed a fascinating trend where use of Excel and Word is dropping while the number of Docs and Sheets is shooting up.

We’re in the midst of evaluating a new CRM system, and our COO has one requirement: it has to integrate with Google Apps. Now that’s a success story every IT manager likes to share.

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