Fortune 500 Electronics Manufacturer Makes Collaboration a Competitive Advantage…and Saves $2 Million A Year
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When electronics manufacturer Sanmina adopted G Suite several years ago, its goals were clear: reduce licensing costs, simplify management—particularly of its messaging tools—and cut hardware expenditures.
Fast forward several years and the Fortune 500 company has achieved those goals and more. By moving to Gmail, Sanmina reduced more than 110 email servers by over 90%, freed up its IT support function from basic administration to focus on more valuable tasks, and saved $2 million a year on total cost of ownership (including over $1.5 million a year on IT licensing).
A long-term plan: cloud collaboration
For Sanmina CIO Manesh Patel, the impressive returns are part of a bigger plan. From the beginning, Manesh recognized the potential of moving to the cloud to facilitate collaboration across Sanmina’s global operations. With more than 45,000 employees across 26 countries delivering different elements of a global value chain from design to delivery, the benefits of improving collaboration were clear. It could open up innovation by drawing on ideas from different locations and teams and enhance quality control throughout the manufacturing process.
As the first step towards this compelling vision, Manesh focused on rolling out Gmail and Calendar. Both applications were already familiar to many employees and offered a straightforward route to embrace cloud services. With cost savings quickly following, colleagues across Sanmina could see clear benefits from the shift to the cloud.
At the same time, Sanmina made the full suite of tools available and allowed adoption to occur organically across the organization.
Driving adoption
As interest in cloud computing grew, G Suite provided an ideal platform for employees to explore new ways of working together—with some parts of the business swift to develop effective uses for the collaborative tools. Building on the work of these leaders, Manesh has promoted adoption of the suite on several fronts over the past 18 months. Manufacturing, Quality, Engineering, and Supply Chain are a few examples of early adopters that benefit from the improved collaboration in G Suite.
The company also looked to build greater awareness of new G Suite features and functions. It engaged with Google partner Maven Wave. “Maven Wave has been a terrific and responsive partner,” he says. “They’re open and adapted their approach to our needs, while bringing a core competency on G Suite.” Maven Wave brought the experience of working with other global companies on similar initiatives, and an effective change management methodology that was tailored to fit Sanmina’s culture.
“Hangouts Meet fundamentally changes how people interact; you can put a face to a name and really engage with your team. It’s as close as you can get to meeting in person.”
– Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina
The messaging tools were not being used to full effect either. When Gmail was first introduced, training was optional; some of the teams were therefore not familiar with features such as attaching documents from Google Drive or archiving content. To help ensure the whole business was using Gmail to its full potential, there has been strong internal promotion of Google’s easy-to-use, online G Suite Training tools. “It’s very easy to consume and very effective,” says Manesh.
Embracing collaboration
Today, Sanmina employees rely daily on several G Suite tools, including Docs, Sheets, Slides, and most recently Hangouts Meet.
“More and more of our employees use Hangouts Meet. Our employees often work as part of teams that are dispersed around the world, so they don’t have the chance to actually meet their colleagues,” Manesh explains. “Hangouts Meet fundamentally changes how people interact; you can put a face to a name and really engage with your team. It’s as close as you can get to meeting in person.”
Manesh acknowledges that this is not simply a result of technological change, but a cultural shift as people grow more comfortable with video calls in their personal lives. Hangouts Meet brings that same ease of use to professional settings—and even well-traveled executives are adopting Hangouts Meet, appreciating its versatility across multiple platforms.
To encourage further use, the IT team has committed to equipping at least one room in every Sanmina facility around the world with Hangouts Meet hardware. “We definitely expect to save time and reduce travel costs with Hangouts Meet,” Manesh confirms. “But the bigger benefit for us is definitely the way it brings people together.”
Collaborating across teams and communities
With that goal in mind, Manesh has also promoted several other collaboration tools—in particular Hangouts Chat, Reveal, and Team Drives.
“More and more of our communications take place via Chat, whether in a team environment or one-to-one setting,” he says. “It’s the asynchronous tool that works alongside Hangouts Meet, for synchronous collaboration.”
Similarly, the use of Reveal—a corporate video sharing platform developed by Maven Wave and Google—is growing. “We’ve just started using Reveal to distribute regular video messages from the CEO to our employees and we also expect it to be a big part of our internal communications,” Manesh says. These videos help keep Sanmina employees aligned with company goals and increase a sense of connectedness across the global organization.
Sharing files between dispersed teams
The move to increase use of Team Drives, meanwhile, is one of Manesh’s priorities. “In every one of our factories worldwide, we have a shared drive on a shared server. We’re in the process of moving those to Team Drives, which will provide a big benefit in terms of infrastructure and in terms of how we work.”
“G Suite enables us to collaborate efficiently and create complex process documents that help us adhere to strict quality control requirements.”
– Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina
Manesh and his team have spent a lot of time and effort improving capacity, redundancy, and failover capabilities in preparation for the change. Team Drives should reduce storage requirements and remove challenges and costs tied to back-up and maintenance.
More importantly, the use of Team Drives will mean that files can be shared across multiple sites to further improve collaboration across teams.
Bringing collaboration to the factory floor
The power of G Suite is evident across the organization—from its corporate offices to its factories worldwide. “We’ve had employees creating a Google Sheet, sharing it with five team members, and then displaying it on a big screen on the manufacturing floor so everyone can see the project status,” he explains.
Another key process that is being transformed is quality reporting. The quality team has identified that moving large quantities of required documentation from legacy technologies to G Suite can assist with transparency and version control, routing, and approvals. “G Suite enables us to collaborate efficiently and create complex process documents that help us adhere to strict quality control requirements,” Manesh says.
“We need to empower employees to get the information they need, when they need it, on any device. G Suite makes that happen.”
– Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina
Gaining a competitive edge
Sanmina continues to achieve solid year-over-year returns on its investment in G Suite, and those returns will grow with increased adoption. “G Suite really is at the heart of our efforts to get people to work in ways that are more efficient and effective,” Manesh says.
For a company with a rich history of innovation and service, the expanded use of G Suite is another way that Sanmina stands out from competitors. “We need employees to be empowered to get the information they need, when they need it, and on any device. G Suite makes that happen.”
Discovery’s Massive Workspace Migration Fuels Innovation and Collaboration
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In the past two decades, Discovery has moved from a purely cable business based in the U.S. to a global media and entertainment powerhouse. Like many other businesses in the industry, we’ve had to adjust to the unique shifts in people’s behaviors and preferences, almost all of which result from the rise in streaming.
We have always been consumer-obsessed at Discovery, with a corporate culture built on the desire to entertain and inspire people of all ages and backgrounds with exceptional content. As we’ve grown, we have also learned just how important it is to be staff-obsessed, giving our employees the best possible experiences so they can continue to innovate and deliver the world-class content our customers expect.
In 2019, we decided one way to fuel innovation and collaboration among employees was to bring in Google Workspace. Selected for its intuitive, easy-to-use, and constantly evolving tools, Google Workspace enables teams to seamlessly create, connect, and collaborate anywhere, anytime.
Given the scope of our ambitions, and recognizing the challenges of migrating 16,500 global employees to a new collaboration solution, we worked with Google Cloud premier partner SADA to get the job done.
Change management amid a massive migration
We began the move to Google Workspace by migrating our document storage system from a legacy cloud provider to Google Drive. This included 86 million items amounting to about two petabytes of data migrated with minimal disruptions. A few months later we completed our move to Google Workspace by migrating 1.2 million calendar invites and 20,800 mail accounts, including thousands of collaborative inboxes and delegated accounts.
In addition to the technical support and Google Workspace expertise that SADA provided, they also partnered with our project team on the change management strategy. Despite challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, our training team and SADA were able to offer outstanding educational opportunities to assist our workforce in the transition and to get the most out of Google Workspace. This included collaborating on over 240 global webinars in seven languages.
Discovering the power of transformative tools
Discovery has many types of end users, from finance professionals and marketing teams to producers and content developers. The fact that Google Workspace has been well-received across the company is a testament to the power of the solution.
Many of our teams have taken advantage of collaborative Gmail accounts and shared drives, providing them with a centralized location to seamlessly communicate and work together on team-focused projects. Our internal communications team is especially happy with the real-time collaborative editing experience within Docs as they work on company-wide emails, announcements, and other projects.
These collaboration tools have allowed us to stay agile amid global lockdowns and will continue to do so as we adapt to a more flexible working environment.
The value of partnership
While we were comfortable with our legacy collaboration suite, one of the biggest benefits of switching to Google Workspace has been Google Cloud’s and SADA’s partnership. They provide us with regular updates on product roadmaps, upcoming features, and more.
This is just the beginning as we plan to grow, deliver new content, and lead the media and entertainment industry with the help of these two great partners and their solutions.
To learn more about Discovery’s journey with Google Workspace, read the full case study.
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How This 70-Year Old Japanese Shoe-maker Uses Collaboration to Beat Competition
For over six decades now, ASICS, a Japanese footwear, and sports equipment provider—for some of the biggest names in the sporting world—has been in the business of making sport a part of people’s lives. From manufacturing basketball shoes in 1949, ASICS soon began to design sports shoes for Olympians.
Headquartered in Kobe, Japan, ASICS is an acronym for the Latin phrase Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, meaning Sound Mind in a Sound Body.
“With over 65 years of history in the sporting goods business, we care for more than just quality products. We’re obsessed with customer experience,” says Paul Miles, Senior General Manager, Global Marketing Division, ASICS.
And without technology that’s not possible.
“Technology is helping us work better with athletes wherever they are. Whether it’s studying their performance, predicting the needs of customers through data, developing our products or simply inventing. Tech is enabling a new realm of possibility. When tech enables collaboration without limitation, the customer wins,” says Miles.
Watch the video to find out how ASICS has retained its place and how it continues to beat competition in a crowded sports market.
From operations to planning, G Suite customers scale data insights with Connected Sheets
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We recently announced the general availability of Connected Sheets, which brings you the power and scale of a BigQuery data warehouse in the familiar context of Google Sheets. With Connected Sheets, you can analyze billions of rows and petabytes of data in Sheets without specialized knowledge of computer languages like SQL. This makes it easy for anyone, not just data analysts, to apply pivot tables, charts, and formulas to massive datasets and unlock insights.
Our customers use Connected Sheets to enable data-driven decision-making across their organizations. We’ve heard many stories about how Connected Sheets has enabled them to achieve operational efficiencies and new ways of unlocking the power of their data; we’d like to share a few here.
Operate with agility
Now more than ever, it’s critical for organizations to react with flexibility and agility to new realities. Connected Sheets helps organizations harness and collaborate on massive amounts of data, making it easier to understand and quickly respond to today’s dynamic landscape.
The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) helps the UN and its partners deliver peace and security, humanitarian, and development solutions. As COVID-19 emerged, UNOPS used Connected Sheets to help coordinate a swift global response. Says Tushar Dighe, Chief Information Officer at UNOPS, “When the COVID-19 pandemic started, we needed to quickly assess the status of our operational capacity in order to assist governments with the response. We used a Connected Sheet with data from our BigQuery data warehouse combined with manual status inputs on the same Sheet, where colleagues in more than 80 countries were able to collaboratively provide inputs. The results in the form of pivots and charts were instantly available live. It took less than three hours to design and implement the solution, and we had status information from more than 80 countries within the first 24 hours.”
Improve business and financial reporting
Reports and dashboards displaying business metrics, like revenue figures or operational KPIs, play a critical role in organizations. These reports help sales teams track performance, enable finance teams to make projections, and provide business leaders with a picture of their organization’s health. Especially now, as businesses adapt their planning to reflect the new normal and employees remain dispersed, it’s doubly important that teams can quickly access and collaborate on business and financial dashboards, from wherever they are. But building and maintaining these reports can be time consuming and error-prone, and requests for changes or new views result in manual work for data analysts. All of this just extends the time to insight and action.
Connected Sheets helps automate report creation, while maintaining a single source of truth for data in BigQuery. The live connection between BigQuery and Sheets also means that data stays fresh, minimizing the risk that people make decisions based on outdated information and avoiding the data integrity risks of manual data pulls.
Says Alexander Danilowicz, a Software Engineer at data connectivity company LiveRamp, “Our Finance team uses Connected Sheets to automate reports that are shared with other stakeholders to run the business. This enables our business partners to analyze and create pivot tables on massive datasets, which is not possible in a traditional spreadsheet.”
“Now that it’s all integrated, there’s no human error involved. Changes can be made at the click of a button, resulting in 10 hours saved per month,” he adds.
Track product adoption
It’s important for teams across the business to understand customer adoption of products and services, whether it’s the product team tracking usage of a newly released feature or the support team trying to anticipate incoming service requests. Similarly, IT teams need to analyze adoption of an organization’s internal applications and systems, so they know what tools employees are using and how they are being used. But product adoption datasets are often too large for traditional spreadsheets to handle, and new data is continuously being added.
Connected Sheets can provide teams access to large, powerful, and up-to-date usage datasets, in the familiar Sheets interface. PwC, a global professional services organization, uses Connected Sheets as part of its efforts to make technology and data more accessible across its workforce. One way PwC uses Connected Sheets is to monitor and analyze internal adoption of tools like G Suite.
Says Peter Van Nieuwerburgh, Global Change Manager at PwC, “If you look at our own adoption dashboarding, it’s more than three terabytes of data—good luck putting that in any spreadsheet. With Connected Sheets, we’re not really pulling the data into the spreadsheet, rather it lives in the database where it belongs. The ability to go and so easily analyze and visualize the data is really powerful.”
We hope Connected Sheets helps to scale data-driven decision making at your organization, by making powerful data easily accessible across your sales, finance, product, and IT teams.
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FFF Enterprises See 80% Improvements in Speed at Lower Cost by Moving SAP Data to Google Cloud
FFF Enterprises, a pharmaceutical distributor of lifesaving biopharma products, vaccines and plasma products deployed SAP on Google Cloud to leverage its ability to scale server demands, reduce costs and improve speed and performance. Learn how the migration helps FFF empower healthcare to care!
How This Online Shoe Retailer Transformed Itself by Reducing its Workload by Two Hours Per Day
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By offering customers a choice of 30,000 shoe styles at reasonable prices with a straightforward returns policy, Footway has become one of the largest online shoe retailers in Europe. Founded in 2011 and based in Kista, Sweden, the company has grown to become a market leader and four years ago acquired the Heppo and Brandos brands.
In 2017, Footway expanded from the Nordic market to seven other European countries: Poland, Holland, the UK, France, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
To build the business, Footway has had to prove to its customers that buying shoes online is quick and easy. That means, at the backend, processing returns and queries efficiently to provide a seamless consumer experience. However, as the company’s IT infrastructure grew organically, its data storage procedures were not clearly systematized, which made it difficult to implement the efficient, time-saving processes that enable Footway to provide its excellent customer service.
The company needed to move its team onto a system that would resolve this issue, and make compliance to ever-changing data regulations easier. Implementing G Suite was the answer.
“One of our strategic objectives is to automate processes and increase efficiency in our organization,” says Louise Liljedahl, HR Manager and Co-founder at Footway. “We want to work more efficiently every day. One of our main goals with the G Suite project was to get everyone working in the same platform with good structure.”
Systematizing data storage
In order for a relatively small team to run a big retail operation, good organization and process automation are key. Before working with Google Cloud, Footway’s communications and data storage processes were not systematized, making it difficult to work effectively. “Our internal IT had many different places to save files, and, for example, no structure for where to save pictures or graphic elements or where to archive agreements,” explains Louise. “Another trigger for change was the GDPR. To be compliant, we needed to see who has access to what information, and looked for good audit systems to control those permissions”. To do that, Footway implemented G Suite.
With support from implementation partner Avalon Solutions, the migration of the company’s calendar, contacts, and email data using CloudMigrator was swift and seamless. “The transformation process was very lean and quick,” says Louise. “We had a small test group of six people working with G Suite for two weeks to see how to move over to Google Sheets from Excel, for example. Everyone was very enthusiastic.”
To systematize its storage and make day-to-day working easier, Footway moved its document and images to Google Drive. This means Footway can control access both internally and externally. “Google Drive helps us keep everything in the right place. And it is definitely an easier way to share things when it comes to working with external partners, as we know exactly who we’re sharing documents and information with.”
Increasing automation
Following the move to G Suite, Footway automated communications with influencers and bloggers using Gmail and Google Forms. This saves time and means more bloggers can be contacted.
“We send automatic emails through G Suite to different influencers to set up cooperative agreements and partnerships,” says Louise. “Using Gmail and Forms has helped us to go from having contact with 4 bloggers a day, to 200 a day. The person responsible saves two hours a day from his or her workload with this new process.”
Achieving stable growth
Thanks to G Suite, Footway’s data is now organized in a way that is easily accessible and highly secure. “It’s much easier to find company and client information because it’s structured,” says Louise. “That saves a lot of time when searching for something.” The ways people can collaborate have also been transformed, as Footway made the switch to using Google Chromebook, encouraging more flexible working and spontaneous collaboration. “Before, people would take notes on paper and come back to their computer to write everything down. Now they use their Chromebooks instead and have more small, spontaneous meetings.”
Now, Footway plans to extend the use of Chromebooks and to use the functions G Suite offers to further automate the company’s daily processes and grow the business. “People tend to be fearful of change, but this one has been very positive for the whole organization,” says Louise. “We’re excited about how G Suite can help us as a company to grow in a stable way. We can automate processes and use Google products to work more efficiently.”
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