As a family supermarket chain since 1939, Schnuck Markets Inc. depends on driving efficiency and volume sales to achieve its mission, identifying customer service and community partnerships among its key differentiators.

In order to commit its maximum resources for success, Schnucks continues to focus on streamlining operations and achieving greater efficiency. Management and administrative staff throughout the company’s 100 stores in five states need to be able to collaborate effortlessly while enjoying an accurate, centralized information exchange platform. These efficiencies have the potential to impact productivity, customer service, and employee engagement.

Fast-tracking data sharing

Before adopting G Suite, Schnucks found collaborative workflows to be a challenge. Managers from different stores, often in different states, had to provide data that could be compiled and shared. Collaborative documents on traditional platforms faced challenges at Schnucks, where limits of simultaneous users would result in user lockouts. Schnucks managers often exchanged many different versions of the same documents and spreadsheets. However, reconciling all those versions was time-consuming and limited real-time collaboration.

“When we share a Google sheet and request data, 200 people can add their responses immediately at the same time from any device. They don’t walk away and forget and need a reminder. The result is near-effortless compliance,” says Kim Anderson, Director of Procurement and Replenishment at Schnucks.

Schnucks has been successful using the entire range of G Suite tools, with Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Forms contributing to enhanced collaboration. Google Keep is a popular productivity tool for meeting notes and tasks and creating reminders. Schnucks also uses Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat to reduce time and costs spent in face-to-face meetings, and Calendar as the central source for scheduling company events and meetings.

The partnership between Schnucks and Agosto helped with a successful G Suite deployment for the retailer. Agosto helped coordinate the logistics of the move and tackled the G Suite migration with a three-part strategy: IT staffers would move to Google first before employee “Google Guide” experts came in who could help answer teammate G Suite questions.

“Agosto’s deployment plan helped our G Suite deployment run smoothly,” says Dave Steck, Schnucks Vice President of Development and IT Infrastructure. “Their thorough planning helped mitigate the inevitable disruption a change of this size would make.”

Enhanced security and reliability

Previously, Schnucks relied on email to exchange information and any outages added even more lag time to its operations. With Gmail and the entire G Suite, Schnucks now experiences virtually no downtime, allowing for effective communication with enhanced levels of reliability and security.

“We were able to take advantage of the security benefits of G Suite right away,” says Joey Smith, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Schnucks. “Our administrators are able to quickly configure, test, and manage our G Suite security settings to fit the security needs of our business while maintaining compliance with all regulatory obligations.”

On top of the CapEx and OpEx savings with Google providing infrastructure for its office productivity software, Schnucks has gained increased security and high availability, as well as robust disaster recovery. These features are included in G Suite, without any need for IT intervention.

“G Suite automatically encrypts our data with a unique encryption key for each piece and distributes it across multiple data centers for performance, security, and reliability,” says Joey. “This saves us a significant amount of time and money while achieving top notch security.”

Another way Schnucks benefits from Google security is the availability of data loss protection (DLP) features native to Gmail. With DLP, Schnucks can automatically audit outgoing emails for Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and other information the store requires.

“DLP is very powerful because it provides detailed visibility,” says Joey. “We can isolate emails, analyze patterns of false positives, and follow up with education or enhanced restrictions to increase security.”

Spam reduction

An unexpected advantage of adopting G Suite was an instantaneous reduction in spam emails. That’s more administrative time saved for employees. In fact, Gmail native spam prevention is so effective that Schnucks was able to replace its third-party spam filter with a simpler technology that costs 80% less.

Savings on hardware and software

Converting to G Suite saves Schnucks the operational costs of an infrastructure for office and communications solutions, but its web interface also provides substantial savings on application maintenance, anti-virus software, and hardware.

With G Suite files and applications residing in the cloud, the need for employees to use heavyweight installable applications is increasingly rare. As laptops age, Schnucks is replacing them with Chromebooks, saving approximately $1,250 per computer. Because Chromebooks don’t require additional anti-virus software or many other endpoint security measures, the need for software licenses and other security and maintenance costs are simultaneously reduced.

Schnucks also finds that Chromebooks instantly increase productivity. “What’s great about the Chromebook is the productivity savings we get from the speed and ease of use and management,” says Dave Steck, Vice President of Development and IT Infrastructure at Schnucks. “You’re not waiting for applications to start up. As a result, Chromebooks are the only laptops we need for the majority of our teammates.”

Aligning the company across sites

More than just providing a common set of office tools, intuitive collaboration in G Suite enables the grocery chain to provide consistent messaging and a central information hub across all store locations. With posters, presentations, and communications, Schnucks worked hard to help ensure that the entire company understood the value of the tools. The Operations and IT teams rolled out the changeover in three phases, using Google Guides to show the benefits of adoption and then rolling out to larger groups over time.

“Adopting G Suite as a collaborative platform helped us to integrate individual store activities and increase operational efficiency,” says Dave.

Investing in the future

Employees who were already familiar with G Suite because they used it in school or in their personal lives have found the move eases communications company-wide, and Schnucks believes that the move will also help attract prospective employees who already use G Suite.

“Knowing that more and more prospective employees are already familiar with G Suite is a big win for us,” says Joey. “To them, it helps demonstrate our commitment to innovation.”

Expectations for both consumer and commercial products have changed. Consumers want products that evolve with their needs, adapt to their preferences, and stay up-to-date over time. Manufacturers, in turn, need to create products that provide engaging customer experiences not only to better compete in the marketplace, but also to provide new monetization opportunities. 

However, embedding intelligence into new and existing products is challenging. Updating hardware is costly, and existing connected products do not have the capability to add new features. Furthermore, manufacturers do not have sufficient customer insights due to product telemetry and customer data silos, and may lack the AI expertise to quickly develop and deploy these features. 

That’s why today we’re launching Intelligent Products Essentials, a solution that allows manufacturers to rapidly deliver products that adapt to their owners, update features over-the-air using AI at the edge, and provide customer insights using analytics in the cloud. The solution is designed to assist manufacturers in their product development journeys—whether developing a new product or enhancing existing ones. 

With Intelligent Products Essentials, manufacturers can:

• Personalize customer experiences: Provide a compelling ownership experience that evolves over the lifetime of the product. For example, a chatbot that contextualizes responses based on product status and customer profile.
• Manage and update products over-the-air: Deploy updates to products in the field,  gather performance insights and evolve capabilities over time with monetization opportunities.
• Predict parts and service issues: Detect operating thresholds, anomalies and predict failures to proactively recommend service using AI, reducing warranty claims, decreasing parts shortages and increasing customer satisfaction.

In order to help manufacturers quickly deploy these use cases and many more, Intelligent Products Essentials provides the following:

• Edge connections: Connect and ingest raw or time-series product telemetry from various device platforms utilizing IoT Core or Pub/Sub and enable deployment and management of firmware over-the-air and machine learning models with Vertex AI at the edge.
• Ownership App Template: Easily build connected product companion apps that work on smartphones, tablets, and computers. Use a pre-built API and accompanying sample app that can incorporate product or device registration, identity management, and provide application behavior analytics using Firebase.
• Product fleet management: Manage, update and analyze fleets of connected products via APIs, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Looker.
• AI services: Create new features or capabilities for your products using AI and machine learning products such as DialogFlow, Vision AI, AutoML, all from Vertex AI.

Enterprise data integration: Integrate data sources such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and others using Dataflow and BigQuery.

Intelligent Products Essentials helps manufacturers build new features across consumer, industrial, enterprise, and transportation products. Manufacturers can implement the solution in-house, or work with one of our certified solution integration partners like Quantifi and Softserve. 

“The focus on intelligent products that Google Cloud is deploying provides a digital option for manufacturers and users. At its heart, systems like Intelligent Product Essentials are all about decision making. IDC sees faster and more effective decision-making as the fundamental reason for the drive to digitize products and processes. It’s how you can make faster and more effective decisions to meet heightened customer expectations, generate faster cash flow, and better revenue realization,” said Kevin Prouty, Group Vice President at IDC. “Digital offerings like Google’s Intelligent Product Essentials potentially go the last mile with the ability to connect the digital thread all the way through to the final user.”

Customers adopting Intelligent Products Essentials

GE Appliances, a Haier company, are enhancing their appliances using new AI-powered intelligent features to enable:

• Intelligent cooking: Help cook the perfect meal to personal preferences, regardless of your expertise and abilities in the kitchen.
• Frictionless service: Build smart appliances that know when they need maintenance and make it simple to take action or schedule services.
• Integrated digital lifestyle: Make appliances useful at every step of the way by integrating them with digital lifestyle services – for example, automating appliance behaviors according to customer calendars, such as oven preheating or scheduling the dishwasher to run in the late evening.

“Intelligent Products Essentials enhances our smart appliances ecosystem, offering richer consumer habit insights. This enables us to develop and offer new features and experiences to integrate with their digital lifestyle.“ —Shawn Stover, Vice-president Smart Home Solutions at GE Appliances.https://www.youtube.com/embed/zaWAJN8aKOw?enablejsapi=1&

Serial 1, Powered by Harley-Davidson, is using Intelligent Product Essentials to manage and update its next generation eBicycles, and personalize its customers’ digital ownership experiences. 

“At Serial 1, we are dedicated to creating the easiest and most intuitive way to experience the fun, freedom, and adventure of riding a pedal-assist electric bicycle. Connectivity is a key component of delivering that mission, and working together to integrate Intelligent Product Essentials into our eBicycles will ensure that our customers enjoy the best possible user experience.”— Jason Huntsman, President, Serial 1. 

Magic Leap, an augmented reality pioneer with industry-leading hardware and software, is building field service solutions with Intelligent Products Essentials with the goal of connecting manufacturers, dealers, and customers to more proactive and intelligent service.

“We look forward to using Intelligent Products Essentials to enable us to rapidly integrate manufacturers’ product data with dealer service partners into our field service solution. We’re excited to partner with Google Cloud as we continue to push the boundaries of physical interaction with the digital world.” — Walter Delph, Chief Business Officer, Magic Leap

Intelligent Product Essentials is available today. To learn more, visit our website.

Over the past year, Google Workspace rapidly evolved to meet the needs of users as we collectively grappled with remote and hybrid work. First, we launched Google Workspace to commercial customers, which brought together the powerful individual apps people know and love into a single, integrated solution. Then we made Google Workspace available to nonprofits, governments, and schools. And in June, we brought the power of Google Workspace to everyone, enabling more than 3 billion users to transform the way they connect, create, and collaborate. To extend these experiences further, we’ve seen a stunning 4.8 billion apps installed in Google Workspace to date. We’re excited to see so many users personalize their experience by adding third-party apps or by building their own to create a more powerful engine for productivity and collaboration. 

As we celebrate the more than 5,300 public apps in the Google Workspace Marketplace that provide users with the opportunity to extend their experience, we’re increasing our investment in the underlying platform. Developers have been able to build applications that integrate with Gmail, Drive, and Docs for years. And today, we’re announcing significant enhancements to the Google Workspace platform by making it just as easy for developers to build applications and integrate with Google Meet, Chat and Spaces.

We’re releasing a new Jira integration for Google Chat and Spaces. This integration enables users to create new tickets quickly, see actionable previews, and monitor issues as they come into the space they’re already using for collaboration. 

“Modern work requires people to switch contexts and tools faster than ever before. We believe an open ecosystem and tight integrations among the tools that users rely on every day is vital to their success. Since 2017, our Trello integration with Gmail has been installed by more than 7 million people. Today, we are excited to build on the partnership between Atlassian and Google to propel work collaboration further with the integration of Jira with Google Chat and Spaces,” said Joff Redfern, Chief Product Officer, Atlassian.

As work continues to evolve, we’re especially committed to the concept of collaboration equity: the ability for everyone to participate and drive impact no matter their location, technical ability, language preference, or device. Carrefour Property – Carmila is evolving how they innovate by connecting frontline workers to those in the office with our no-code development platform AppSheet. For example, after discovering a problem, onsite managers previously had to send an email, enter data into a spreadsheet, and sometimes attend a meeting to explain the issue. Now, with AppSheet, they can simply input the data on their phone in a single step, and the team back at headquarters can see and act on the issue while also tracking all the other issues being reported from other locations.

We continue to empower frontline workers and IT teams alike, bringing more flexibility into Google Workspace by integrating AppSheet into Gmail. This new integration allows anyone—regardless of their coding experience—to reclaim time with custom, no-code apps and automations. Budgets and vacation requests can be approved, inventories and asset management systems can be updated, and much more—all with AppSheet and directly from your inbox. 

New investments in security 

As we continue to deliver delightful new experiences for users, we are keeping security at the forefront; it’s infused in every layer of our product design so that customers have the flexibility and trust needed to operate in a secure environment. To build on this commitment, we’re announcing Google’s new Work Safer offering to help organizations, their employees, and partners collaborate and communicate securely and privately in today’s hybrid work environment. Work Safer will provide companies with access to best-in-class security for email, meetings, and messages, documents, and more. It uniquely brings together the cloud-native, zero-trust solutions of Google Workspace with industry-leading solutions from across Google and its cybersecurity partners, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. 

To further strengthen security and privacy across the Google Workspace platform, we’re also announcing four key new capabilities: 

1. In June, we announced that Client-side encryption (CSE) was available in beta for Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Now we’re bringing CSE to Google Meet, giving customers complete control over encryption keys while helping them meet data sovereignty and compliance requirements. We’re also pleased to announce the beta of our Key Access Service Public APIs, which enables customers to directly manage their encryption keys without the need for a third-party partner.
2. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Chat is now in beta. This is a continuation of our ongoing commitment to help organizations protect their sensitive data and information from getting into the wrong hands, without impacting the end-user experience. With DLP for Chat, you can enable the power of spontaneous conversation between individuals and teams, while preventing sensitive and confidential information from leaving your organization. Interested customers can sign up for the Client-side encryption and DLP for Chat betas today.
3. Drive labels are now generally available. Organizations are now able to classify files stored in Drive based on their sensitivity level. Labels integrate with Google Workspace Data Loss Prevention, making it easier to manage external sharing, downloading, and printing of sensitive files. 
4. We’re rolling out additional protections to safeguard against abusive content and behavior. If a user opens a file that we think is suspicious or dangerous, we’ll display a warning to the user to help protect them and their organization from malware, phishing, and ransomware. This functionality is now available in Google Docs and will be rolling out soon for Google Sheets and Slides. 

Fueling the future of work and collaboration   

Our mission is to empower everyone with an innovative and seamless experience that gives people—no matter their location or technical ability—the opportunity to drive real impact. At its core, the vision of the Google Workspace platform is to help you build your own innovation momentum, while providing a foundation of security and privacy. I hope you’ll join me at the Google Cloud Next ’21 event where you can learn more about the Google Workspace vision, and even better, see these new experiences in action.

Azimut Group operates an international network of companies handling investment and asset management, mutual funds, hedge funds, and insurance. Founded in Milan, Italy in 1988, Azimut Group today has branches in fifteen countries, including Brazil, China, and the USA.

“We have subsidiaries and manage funds all over the world,” explains Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager at Azimut Holding S.p.a. “That means that any technology that we put in place has to cover needs from many different countries.”

“When complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Azimut manages its funds with investment advisors who use information sourced from Bloomberg, Reuters and others. “They use a huge amount of data,” says Simone. “They work with spreadsheets, algorithms, formulae and they analyse data in minutes.” In finance, every second is crucial, which is why Azimut decided to develop a risk management dashboard that can process information even more quickly, then distribute it worldwide.

“When an advisor manages data, that data is used to make immediate decisions on funds, capital movements or whether to sell stock,” says Simone. “They have to be ready to make recommendations for any amount of data that comes to them. For our dashboard, that means that when additional information arrives or complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

Generating insights at speed

Investors and investment managers make decisions based on the most accurate, up-to-date information possible. For Azimut Group, information sourced through financial data vendors such as Bloomberg and Reuters provided only part of the data that the group required.

“We looked to collect information from a range of different providers,” explains Simone, “then analyse it to develop a predictive algorithm that could work faster than an advisor stationed at the terminal. We set ourselves the challenge to try to manipulate that data to add new insights into our matrix, so that every one of our branches across the world can see risk information about the funds in real-time.”

“We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling. With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it.

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

The first cloud provider Azimut used to build its system struggled to scale quickly to meet different kinds of data challenges. “If we wanted to add more cores, that was fine,” says Simone. “But the previous cloud provider made it complicated to raise the amount of space in a database infrastructure and scale up to demand. Scaling up for more in-depth analysis would take a day, and our need was immediate.”

That’s why Azimut switched one year ago to Google Cloud Platform to run the 150 VMs on its risk analysis platform. “We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling,” says Simone. “With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it. Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

The infrastructure of Azimut’s solution handles around 800TB of data per month, and Google’s global network of servers and high-speed connections ensure that it gets to where it’s most needed by the most direct route. Impressed by the speed, security and availability of Google Cloud Platform, Azimut has moved its intranet on to Google Cloud Platform, too, eliminating the need for staff to login with VPNs.

“Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Driving ahead with Noovle

For Azimut, migrating the risk management dashboard is the latest of many Google product collaborations with cloud consultancy Noovle. “Everything started five years ago,” says Simone, “when Noovle assisted us in migrating to Gmail from our on-premise email solution. From G Suite to Google Cloud Platform, we’ve had a great relationship. Noovle provides consultancy services, support for mobility, and external advisors who work on our premises, such as when they trained us how to broadcast our meetings on Google Hangouts. As an independent company, we know we can trust them for transparent advice. All they care about is the best way to get a job done and to help us reach our goals.”

New app, new customers

In a business case comparison, Google Cloud Platform cost Azimut 35% less to run than the previous cloud provider. Now the group is building a major new mobile application on Google App Engine to be released in 2018.

“The new mobile application will allow customers to trade directly, without human advisors, by proposing different investment solutions depending on targets the customers set,” says Simone. “So if a customer aims to make money with investments, they enter their relevant personal information and we carry out the necessary regulatory checks and suggest what they could buy. The entire project will be based on Google Cloud Platform, so customers can control their investments through the app while we manage the fund, using Google Cloud Spanner on the backend.”

Driving impact over output in a new era of work

As Google’s productivity advisor, I spend a lot of time coaching executives on ways they can make the most of their work day. Over the years, people have come to me with very different ideas about what productivity is, why it matters, and how to achieve it. Often, they think it’s about extracting every last ounce of output from a day—likely because the idea of productivity comes from economics and is most closely associated with factory conveyor belts and efficiency. 

My definition of personal productivity is different. It’s less about getting as much as you can out of each day and more about achieving the things you set out to accomplish and making an impact. 

Productivity is grounded in understanding yourself as a whole person. What makes you happy at work and outside of work? What are your natural rhythms and peak times for creativity, focus, or efficiency? When are you most engaged in meetings? What makes you feel unstoppable when responding to emails? And when do you need to take a break, do some uninterrupted thinking, or deepen social connections with your colleagues? 

When people don’t understand these aspects of productivity, they struggle to make an impact—no matter how well they manage their calendars and inboxes. 

During the global pandemic, we’ve realized the importance of sustaining the wellbeing of ourselves and our families, setting healthy boundaries, and bringing intention to the work day. Among those lucky enough to have the flexibility to work from home, many had to juggle new obligations, from homeschooling to caregiving. And without a solid plan in place, people often found themselves working longer hours and facing burnout.

Now, even as the pandemic enters new and unforeseen phases, many organizations are gearing up for a hybrid work model, Google included. As we make those plans, it’s important that people take a fresh look at personal productivity and plan to maximize wellbeing and impact across all the places they work. 

I developed this new guide with these challenges in mind. It gathers up all my best productivity and wellbeing tips from over the years, including how to:

• Rethink your time and your calendar
• Transform your inbox
• Make meetings more meaningful
• Bring productivity and wellbeing together

As we embrace new ways—and places—of working, all these areas feel more important than ever.

Download The Google Workspace guide to productivity and wellbeing.