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.”

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Parveen Chander Aery, CIO, and Rishi Gupta, Head of Global IT Infrastructure, of Ocwen, a provider of residential and commercial mortgage loan services. The U.S.-based company adopted Chrome OS devices to help global contact center teams work productively together.

We’re used to deployments of new technology taking a lot of time and worry. In the past, there wasn’t a fast and easy way to roll out thousands of devices, apps and operating systems to a company of several thousand people. But in March 2020, when we had to help 3500+ contact center and support employees shift safely to remote work, Chrome OS helped us get the job done in just two weeks.

That’s right—we were so impressed that it only took two weeks. We love to talk about the very short Chrome OS deployment timeline, because it happened when we needed everything to go smoothly. We believe we were the first company in our industry to be able to rapidly shift to remote work while maintaining our high levels of service, which are vital to our success. 

A rapid but secure pivot to remote work

Preparing for a fully remote workforce was a bit of a scramble at first. There were so many things to consider, like making sure people had adequate internet access, and securing private customer data once everyone worked in the cloud.

Even though we had to decide on remote-work solutions in a hurry, the IT infrastructure team couldn’t compromise on security. With Chrome OS and a mix of HP Chromebooks, Citrix, and AWS, remote employees were able to work in the cloud, accessing productivity tools like Office 365, Black Knight, and regulatory APIs. 

Chrome OS and Chrome Enterprise Upgrade also allowed the IT infrastructure team to manage enrolled devices in ways that improved security—for example, turning off Bluetooth access. We equipped everyone with productivity kits that included keyboards, mice, and monitors, along with noise-canceling headphones so contact center workers could block out the sounds of busy pandemic home life. We bought internet dongles in bulk to ensure everyone could get online. All of these tools helped the contact center employees easily access our contact center solution, which was developed on the WebRTC platform.

We benefited from easy integration of Chrome OS with single-sign-on tools as well as using Citrix on a much broader scale. Our timing was perfect in terms of moving the company into the cloud. Prior to the pandemic, only about 20% of applications were accessed via Citrix. Today, 100% are accessed through Citrix.

Cloud is our future

Security was crucial, but there have been many other benefits of adopting Chrome OS, such as making work easier for employees by adding links to key business tools via the Chrome homepage. In fact, the rapid shift to the cloud, dictated by remote work, has also changed our company for the better.

Our IT infrastructure team has worked successfully to ensure applications are compatible with Citrix; we’ve also trained contact center employees on using new devices and how to collaborate in the cloud. The employees were used to getting help in-person in our contact center offices—someone could just raise a hand if they needed IT help. While that’s not always possible today, we were relieved that the contact center teams became familiar with Chrome browser and Chrome OS very quickly. Chrome browser is very common with the general public, so the know-how was already there, even for people who were using Chrome OS devices and Citrix for the first time. 

A year and a half after remote work began, we see that Chrome OS devices weren’t simply stopgaps for the pandemic era. They’ve become workplace tools with value far beyond the pandemic. Thanks to the ease of our contact center’s transition to Chrome OS, Ocwen has decided that we’ll remain in a hybrid work model for the foreseeable future, instead of returning 100 percent back to the office. Chrome OS makes this model easy for us because we don’t need to change the data or configuration on a device as people shift from remote to office work.

Whether it’s getting rid of pests, cleaning up a crime scene or tending to office plants, Rentokil Initial is a service business whose primary aim is to offer customers the best possible standard. This can only be achieved if teams work closely together, sharing expertise and ideas and communicating constantly.

We used to have 180 email domains and 40 mail systems in place, so finding contact details and responding quickly to colleagues was a challenge. To tackle this, in 2009, we moved 0 business users, including our ‘on the road’ service technicians and salespeople onto a single communications platform, G Suite.

Since switching to G Suite, we’ve saved millions of pounds (£) on IT maintenance and several hundred thousand pounds by cutting the time spent on administrative tasks through using tools such as Google Docs, Sites and Forms. For senior management, Google Hangouts Meet has also proved its worth, saving roughly 54 hours of the senior management’s time a week – that’s over 2,000 hours a year. In addition to maximizing productivity, online sharing through G Suite products has enabled us to spread knowledge and ideas organically across countries and divisions.

Individual teams have fully embraced the opportunity to share knowledge, using the group intranet, powered by Google Sites, to post training videos and access technical images. But it’s not all about official documents and meetings: online sharing is helping us to become a more personal, sociable organization, which is important for staff retention and working culture. Colleagues use our intranet to share personal achievements, from sleeping on the streets for a homeless charity to boxing in international championships, giving a true flavor of the diversity within the company.

Employees at all levels are embracing G Suite to connect with colleagues. For example, our UK Managing Director uses Google+ to post updates and pictures of his ‘road trips’ across the UK and his encounters with colleagues, from the CFO to our longest standing pest control technicians, providing new insight into his role in the business. The ability to connect directly with our executives and create communities amongst our new employees is radically changing and modernizing the culture of our company.

All in all, we’ve been amazed by the journey which G Suite has taken us on, connecting our teams no matter where they are and no matter what they’re doing and making a difference in almost every corner of our business. Thanks to Google we see ourselves as better connected, able to offer a better service to customers and more competitive on a global scale.