For consulting companies such as EDI Environmental Dynamics Inc. (EDI), interactions among employees and customers are the direct drivers of value, and helping them collaborate has a tangible impact on the bottom line. However, connecting people from the field to work-from-home spaces to the office is no easy task.

EDI, an environmental consulting company that helps organizations assess environmental impacts and meet government regulations, has eight offices across Western and Northern Canada. Frontline workers account for 80% of its total employees, ranging from biologists and scientists to safety inspectors and project managers. EDI’s success is directly linked to its remote workforce’s ability to work effectively in the field and to collaborate with coworkers and clients across Western Canada. With the help of Google Workspace and AppSheet, EDI is enabling its mobile workforce to function more efficiently and collaboratively than ever before.

Bringing efficiency to its frontline workers

Just four years ago, much of EDI’s fieldwork was still being tracked with pen and paper, resulting in frequent challenges, from error-prone data retention to inefficient collaboration. Luckily, EDI was able to address this using AppSheet, Google Cloud’s no-code application development platform. 

With AppSheet, EDI has replaced the majority of its pen-and-paper processes with tailored apps. As EDI’s Director of IT, Dennis Thideman explains, “AppSheet allows us to be much more responsive to our field needs. Using it, we can spin up a basic industrial application, share it with our field workers, and have them adjust their workflows—all in just a few hours. Doing that from scratch might take weeks or months.”

For EDI, there are a couple of features that make AppSheet shine. First, AppSheet is platform-agnostic, meaning it works on most devices and most operating systems, so any employee can access their AppSheet apps. Secondly, because 90% of EDI’s projects involve working in remote areas, they can leverage AppSheet’s Offline Mode, allowing workers to collect data on their mobile devices in the field and have it automatically download when they reconnect to the internet. 

Eliminating the challenges associated with pen and paper has resulted in even more benefits than EDI leaders originally anticipated: namely, employees work faster across an unexpectedly wide range of use cases. For example, governmental regulations require EDI to complete a pre-trip safety evaluation before heading into the field. Before using AppSheet, this evaluation would take upwards of four hours to complete. By streamlining the process with an AppSheet app, EDI employees have reduced that time down to one hour. EDI averages over 850 evaluations every year, and they’ve realized over 2,550 hours in annual savings—savings that can be passed on to clients and allow staff to focus more time on other tasks. This is just one of more than 35 mission-critical applications that EDI has built with AppSheet.

Time savings is a huge benefit, but as Logan Thideman, an IT manager at EDI, explains “At the end of the day, we realized that the biggest benefits of AppSheet aren’t about time savings as much as they are about high-quality data.” Collecting and analyzing good data is critical to EDI’s operations, as most data collected in the field can never be replicated. For example, if a water quality sample for a certain day is lost (which can happen easily when using pen and paper), that information can never be retrieved again. AppSheet makes data collection easy. Employees are much less likely to lose a smart device than they are a paper form, and any data entered would be immediately uploaded to a Google Sheet or SQL database when they return from the field, meaning data is always backed up in the cloud. From there, information can quickly be analyzed by coworkers, passed on to the client, or shared with government agencies to ensure proper compliance.

Overall, EDI found that the more they could enable their field workers with AppSheet apps, the more those employees could focus on providing quality research and recommendations to their clients and gain a stronger competitive advantage in the market.

Enhancing collaboration everywhere

Enabling collaboration in remote environments can be difficult, but Google Workspace has made this easy for EDI. Google Workspace lets employees effortlessly share documents and work together in real time. Given its ease of use for mobile workers, Google Meet has become all-important and is used as EDI’s tool of choice for face-to-face collaboration. It became even more essential when COVID-19 arrived. As Dennis Thideman explains, “Google Meet allowed us to adapt to the COVID-19 environment quickly as we were already conversant with it. In just two days, we were able to transition our employees from office to home because of it.” By leveraging Google Meet and the rest of the Google Workspace platform, EDI employees are able to remain productive, regardless of where they’re working.

Google Workspace also makes it easy to collaborate with customers. Because many of EDI’s customers leverage Microsoft Office tools such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, EDI still needs to use them. Google Workspace makes it easy to continue using Microsoft products in its environment, allowing employees to store Microsoft Office files on Google Drive and open, edit and save them using Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. 

AppSheet and Google Workspace’s deep integrations also make collaboration easy. Employees can update data in Google Sheets, save images and reports to Drive, and update Calendar events all from AppSheet apps. Together, the two platforms simplify many of the activities that consumed so much time in the past.

An empowered workforce

Empowering employees has been at the core of EDI’s success, and Google Workspace and AppSheet have given EDI a clear advantage. Collaboration has become easier and more agile using Google Workspace. Robust AppSheet apps have been built to streamline mission-critical processes. For unique project requirements, simple AppSheet apps are built in a matter of hours. As Dennis Thideman summarizes, Google Workspace and AppSheet “make managing a distributed, deskless workforce much simpler, giving EDI better growth opportunities and a competitive edge in the marketplace.”

Today, we are pleased to announce that Google Workspace has joined the Project Management Institute (PMI) Citizen Developer™ Partner Program. By doing so, we are joining organizations from across the globe who are supporting not only the future of work, but the empowerment of the workers who are leading this charge.

PMI has developed a new suite of resources—called PMI Citizen Developer™—to support individuals and organizations as they embark on their digital transformation journeys. Created with the no-code and low-code community in mind, this first of its kind resource enables a “hyper-agile” way of working to promote best practices on responsible scaling.

“Technologies like AppSheet are democratizing application development and innovation,” said Sam Sibley, Global Head of Citizen Developer at PMI. “No code/low code technology has become a key enabler for faster and more impactful change, allowing organizations to stay relevant by becoming more agile and resilient. Organizations like Google who are at the forefront of technological development are uniquely positioned to support the Citizen Development movement.”

From on-boarding to security at scale, there is no one-size fits all- each organization has a unique set of business needs for consideration. Forrester recently recognized that the demand for citizen developers has reached a critical mass, stating in their report Forrester Wave™: Low-code Platforms for Business Developers, Q4 2021, “This trend is logical, necessary, represents a competitive advantage for firms that do it, and is key to the future of work.”

As a leader in technology for business developers, we’re excited to join the global network of no-code and low-code technologies that are supporting organizations as they build their own future of work. If you’re curious about how you can apply the PMI Citizen Developer™ framework to your organization with no-code, join Google Workspace at PMI’s annual PMXPO virtual event this week.

Google Cloud is proud to support our customers with the cleanest cloud in the industry. For the past four years, we’ve matched 100% of our electricity use with renewable energy purchases, and we were the first company of our size to commit going even further by running on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030.  As we work to achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy, we help you take immediate action to decarbonize your digital applications and infrastructure. We’re also working with our customers across every industry to develop new solutions for the unique climate change challenges that organizations face. Today, we’re excited to expand our portfolio of carbon-free solutions and announce new partnerships that will help every company build a more sustainable future. 

First, we’re launching Carbon Footprint, a new product that provides customers with the gross carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage. Now available to every GCP user for free in the Cloud Console, this tool helps you measure, track and report on the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity of your cloud usage. Of course, the net operational emissions associated with your Google Cloud usage is still zero. With growing requirements for Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, companies are looking for ways to show their employees, boards and customers their progress against climate targets. Using Carbon Footprint, you have access to the gross energy related emissions data you need for internal carbon inventories and external carbon disclosures, with one click. 

Built in collaboration with customers like Atos, Etsy, HSBC, L’Oréal, Salesforce, Thoughtworks and Twitter, our Carbon Footprint reporting introduces a new standard of transparency to support you in meeting your climate goals. You can monitor your gross cloud emissions over time, by project, by product and by region, giving IT teams and developers metrics that can help them reduce their carbon footprint. Our detailed calculation methodology is published so that auditors and reporting teams can verify that their cloud emissions data meets GHG Protocol guidance.

“The power of knowledge combined with the power of technology innovation plays a vital role in proactively responding to the climate crisis we are facing. With Google Carbon Footprint reporting, Atos feeds emissions data in our Decarbonization Data Platform, demonstrating potential emissions reductions from the Google Cloud Platform to our customers. This reporting opens up new levels of emissions transparency, trajectory planning, and data insight to support our customers in meeting, and potentially accelerating towards, their climate goals.”—Nourdine Bihmane, Head of Decarbonization Business Line, Atos

“The capability to measure and understand the environmental footprint of our Public Cloud usage is among the key axis of our sustainable tech roadmap. With Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, we are now able to directly follow the impact of our sustainable infrastructure approach and architecture principles.”—Hervé DUMAS, Sustainability IT Director, L’Oreal

While digital infrastructure emissions are just one part of your environmental footprint, accurately accounting for IT carbon emissions is necessary to measure progress against the carbon reduction targets required to avert the worst consequences of climate change. To help you account for emissions beyond our cloud and across your organization, we’re excited to partner with Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, integrating our Google Cloud Platform emissions data into their carbon accounting platform. 

“As we face unprecedented climate challenges, companies across the globe need to embed sustainability into the core of their business in order to meet growing customer and stakeholder expectations, and reduce their environmental impact. Together, Google Cloud and Salesforce Sustainability Cloud can help our joint customers accelerate their path to Net Zero, leveraging data-driven insights and visualizations to track and reduce their carbon emissions to drive sustainable change.”—Ari Alexander, GM of Salesforce Sustainability Cloud. 

From information to action

With the gross energy-related emissions footprint of data associated with your Google Cloud usage now available, we’re committed to providing tools to not only measure your carbon footprint, but help you reduce it. We recently launched low-carbon region icons to help you choose cleaner regions to locate your Google Cloud resources. New users who see the icons are over 50% more likely to choose clean regions over others, ensuring their applications emit less carbon over time. 

For current Google Cloud users, we’re pleased to announce that Active Assist Recommender will include a new sustainability impact category, extending its original core pillars of cost, performance, security, and manageability. Starting with the Unattended Project Recommender, you’ll soon be able to estimate the gross carbon emissions you’ll save by removing your idle resources. Unattended Project Recommender uses machine learning to identify, with a high degree of confidence, projects that are likely abandoned based on API and networking activity, billing, usage of cloud services, and other signals, and provides actionable recommendations on how to remediate those abandoned projects. By deleting these projects, not only can you reduce costs and mitigate security risks, but you can also reduce your carbon emissions. In August, Active Assist analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across our platform, and over 600,000 gross kgCo2e was associated with projects that it recommended for cleanup or reclamation. If customers deleted these projects they would significantly reduce future gross carbon emissions. Check out this blog to learn more about Active Assist.

Solutions for climate resilience 

Many of our customers face difficult questions about how their business impacts the natural environment today, and how it will be affected by climate change in the future. Answering these questions requires rich datasets about the planet, better analytics tools and smarter models to predict potential outcomes. For over a decade Google Earth Engine has supported scientists and developers with hyperscale computing power and the world’s largest catalog of satellite image data. Today, we are delighted to announce the preview of Earth Engine as part of Google Cloud Platform. Now, you can access Earth Engine and combine it with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery. By extending Earth Engine’s powerful platform to enterprises through Google Cloud, we are bringing the best of Google together. 

Over the past year we’ve worked with a number of organizations to use Earth Engine technology with tools like BigQuery and the Cloud AI Platform to develop new solutions for responsible commodity sourcing, sustainable land management and carbon emissions reduction. Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, thus  helping them save on operational costs, mitigate and better manage risks, and become more resilient to climate change threats. This new offering will wrap the unique data, insights and functionality of Earth Engine with a fully-managed, enterprise-grade experience and reliability.

As we work with our customers to accelerate their sustainability initiatives, earth observation data is proving critical to effectively plan for the long-term impacts of climate change. To extend our geospatial and sustainability use cases we’re also expanding our partnerships with CARTO, Climate Engine, Geotab, NGIS, and Planet to bring their data and core applications to Google Cloud.

These partners will each make their existing platforms and datasets available globally on Google Cloud, giving you low-latency and reliable access to critical data and applications that will inform your sustainability initiatives. By integrating water availability, agricultural data, weather risks, and extensive daily satellite imagery into Earth Engine and BigQuery, you can achieve more ambitious goals for the sustainability of your business and our planet.

Committing to help you meet your climate goals

With each of these tools, we’re working to reduce the barriers you face in adopting more sustainable technology practices. We understand that building more sustainable applications and infrastructure is not easy. You face competing priorities, technical challenges, and the perception that climate action is costly. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, we are making a sustainability pledge to you: teams across Google Cloud are committing to eliminating the barriers you face in building a more sustainable digital future for your organization, and will help you take action today to realize your climate goals. We’ll do this in a number of ways: 

1. In digital transformation projects and workshops, sustainability teams will always have a seat at the planning table, so we can work together on using cloud technology to build a more sustainable future. 
2. We’re putting low-carbon signals natively into our products to help developers choose more sustainable options early in their application development. 
3. We’ll ensure carbon impact is measured consistently with other key performance indicators. Leveraging the social cost of carbon, the ROI models and value assessments you conduct with Google Cloud will project your emissions impact too. 
4. We’ll be transparent about our carbon impact, by publishing third-party reviewed reports and methodologies, so you can trust the data for your own reports and disclosures. 
5. We’ll continue to work with the industry on best practices, including educational resources like Sustainable IT – Decoded, a new masterclass created in partnership with Intel, that shares the expertise of sustainability thought leaders. 

For the next decade we need to work together to avert the worst consequences of climate change. We’ve made tremendous progress in building technology that helps everyone do more for the planet, and we’re excited to see what you do with it. Visit this page to learn more about Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts.