How EDI empowers its workforce in the field, in the office, and at home
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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.”
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The future of meetings in G Suite: Vision and roadmap
A study from MIT Sloan school in early April showed that 47% of US workers were already working from home. Compare that to just 13% before the pandemic. And these numbers are likely to be even greater today.
Video meetings help us connect in a human way, whether it’s for work, a personal commitment, or for education. We have seen Meet’s day-over-day growth surpass 60%. Meet daily usage is more than 30 times what it was in January 2020. And we have been able to scale to this demand easily. Scalability, security, reliability, come naturally to Google Cloud and are in-built into all our services. Our customers have been reaching out to tell us how much this has helped them shift to remote work rapidly during the pandemic.
G Suite continues to innovate on how teams communicate effectively, regardless of whether they are located in the same office or thousands of miles apart. In this video, we share our vision for the future of meetings, small and large, and how these innovations will help build human connections in a video-first world. We’ll also provide a sneak peek into what we’re doing to transform the overall life cycle of a meeting, from scheduling to follow-up.
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How Bloomberg uses Google Translate to Share Breaking News with the World
Bloomberg uses Google Translate to instantly share news with customers in more than 170 countries. Financial markets can move within seconds of a story breaking, so speed matters. With Google’s automated translation Bloomberg can quickly disseminate breaking financial news to customers around the world in 40 different languages.
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What’s new and next in Android Enterprise
Many of you know Android as a consumer platform that has provided mobile data access on smartphones and tablets to over 2 and 1/2 billion people across the world. But we see Android as an enterprise operating system that spans a variety of form factors and use cases. We work with manufacturers across the globe, who create Android devices compliant with services, like Google Play.
And that means, whether you’re trying to enable employees with smartphones, frontline workers with rugged devices, create digital kiosks for customers to interact with, or build point solutions, like point of sale systems or signage, there’s an Android device that fits your need.
And as an organization, when you know how to build Android apps on one form factor, you can tailor these applications to be redeployed onto another because Android represents a common platform, irrespective of the hardware that you choose.
Learn how Android is tackling the biggest issues facing mobility strategies today, from balancing security and privacy to providing user experience and productivity innovation at scale.
How Japan’s Vaccine Locator Platform Became A One-stop Shop for COVID-19 and Vaccination-related Information
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Editor’s Note: David Moore, Founder and CEO of Navagis, shares his story of teaming up with the Google Maps Platform team to help people across Japan get vaccinated amid COVID-19 pandemic.
The roots of Navagis go back to Hurricane Katrina, when I led an Army Corps of Engineers team that deployed 3D mapping technologies with Google Earth to respond to critical needs on the U.S. Gulf Coast. As a Google Cloud Premier Partner we work across various industries and organizational types to solve location intelligence challenges with our software solutions.
The experience taught me how powerful mapping insights can be in protecting lives when disaster strikes. The COVID-19 crisis brought a brand new human challenge to the world and like other countries, Japan found itself struggling to vaccinate its 125 million people, while trying to communicate about where (and under what circumstances) people could get their vaccines.
Our end goal was to build a reliable, enriched, real-time dataset on Japan’s vaccination centers. Living in Japan, seeing some confusion and anxiety, I felt great urgency when I accepted the mission on behalf of our team.
From the very beginning we faced many challenges. Japan was experiencing unique difficulties in building an accurate real-time vaccine locator. First, we noticed the fragmentation of address information across thousands of local governments, from Hokkaido in the north to subtropical Okinawa in the south. Second, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare had launched a website of nationwide vaccination sites, which they were constantly updating data sources. We noticed the location information was prone to inconsistencies due to its dispersion at the local level, and different conventions among prefectures on writing addresses. In order to ensure the integrity of a massive amount of decentralized data, mostly in Japanese, we required on-the-ground presence and experience.
In addition, we needed to go beyond simply mapping the location of vaccination centers. Each one needed to be a one-stop shop for all information regarding vaccination, including opening hours, safety precautions, and qualifications for getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
Round-the-clock teamwork builds a helpful, informative mapping solution
People might think of mapping as all about AI, advanced satellites, and cloud computing power. Of course, these are essential. What is less known is the massive amount of human toil and dedication that goes into making vaccine location information available especially for an urgent health mission for a country as large and complex as Japan.
Realizing our task was urgent, we worked with the Google Maps Platform team across time zones and over weekends to make this happen fast. In some cases a vaccine center was at a place where one would not normally expect to get a vaccine—like a pop-up location at a convention center. So we matched vaccine center addresses from the government website against Google Maps Platform’s Places data.
In under two weeks, we had identified, matched and marked tens of thousands of locations as vaccination centers around the country. Moreover, the power of the Geolocation API and Places API enabled us to provide richer details for many of the centers.
One of the unique aspects of this project was being able to surface our work across multiple channels to accomplish a single goal. We were able to work with Google to ensure the vaccine centers appeared on the consumer user-facing Google Maps apps and website, with information to help citizens learn where and how to get their vaccine. Our team was in hourly contact with requests such as “this center is mission-critical, can we get it mapped?” They were able to quickly get the site listed and visible on the map for end-users. This was a big human mobilization.
Powerful mapping APIs for pinpointed vaccine location information
We couldn’t have accomplished the massive task of validating 35,000 vaccination sites in such a short period of time without Google’s mapping APIs. The Maps Geocoding API and Places API enabled us to take location data from the government website, and quickly verify whether the location existed, or not, with up-to-date places intelligence.
The Places API served a critical role in two ways: breadth of information (covering Japan’s entire territory), and depth of information (complex insight into each place, such as landmarks and phone numbers).
The ability to take the addresses provided by the government of vaccination sites, run them through the Places API, and assess the address quality helped enormously. Google Street View, meanwhile, provided a further level of validation, enabling us to visually identify the specific locations where errors remained, and manually identifying clinics and hospitals before identifying their precise latitude and longitude within cities in Japan.
Looking beyond COVID-19
Japan went from being a laggard in global vaccination rates before the summer of 2021 to one of the leaders, with nearly 80% of the population fully vaccinated. And, daily confirmed cases had been as low as 100 nationwide prior to Omicron emerging globally.
The prospect of putting to bed our adventure with the Japan Vaccine Locator couldn’t bring us more joy.
Except perhaps, the prospect of helping people rediscover the joy of a return to normalcy—in partnership with Google Maps Platform.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
Google Dataflow Named Leader in The 2021 Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics
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We are excited to announce that Google has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 report. Thank you to our strong community of customers and partners for working with us to deliver a customer focused product. We believe Forrester’s recognition is an acknowledgement of our leadership across an integrated set of capabilities that rely on data to drive transformation. We were also honored to be named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021.
Forrester gave Dataflow a score of 5 out of 5 across 12 different criteria and according to the report: “Google Cloud Dataflow has strengths in data sequencing, advanced analytics, performance, and high-availability. Google Dataflow’s sweet spot is for enterprises that have a preponderance of real-time data generated on Google Cloud Platform or wish to simplify all data processing by using a single platform that unifies both streaming and batch jobs.”
Harnessing the power of real-time data
The speed with which businesses are able to respond to change is the difference between those that successfully navigate the future and those that get left behind. In order to accelerate their digital transformation, reimagine their business and leverage the power of real-time data, today’s data leaders require a streaming analytics platform that provides both depth and breadth.
Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Dataflow, based on more than a decade of experience in internet scale systems for Google’s own needs, provide customers with a reliable, scalable, performant platform. In addition, we’ve designed these products for ease of use to make streaming analytics accessible to more users, which is why customers such as Sky and others from across all industries use Dataflow to run streaming analytics workloads.
5 out of 5 across key streaming analytics criteria
While Forrester gave Dataflow a score of 5 out of 5 in 12 criteria, the product achieved the highest possible scores in areas that are top of mind for our customers.
We continue to be focused on solving problems that matter to you. For example, just in the last month we announced Dataflow Prime and Auto Sharding for BigQuery – two new auto tuning capabilities that bring efficiency and simplicity to your streaming pipelines.
Dataflow achieves highest score possible in strategy
With Google, organizations gain an industry leading product and a partner that has the vision and strategy to help you tackle new business challenges and provide delightful experiences to your customers.
In summary, we are honored to be a Leader in The Forrester Wave™, Streaming Analytics, and look forward to continuing to innovate and partner with you on your digital transformation journey.
Download the full report: The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 and check out these smart analytics reference patterns. To learn more about Dataflow, visit our website and get to know the product by taking an interactive tutorial. You can also watch recordings from the Data Cloud Summit event (May 2021), where we provided an in-depth view of new product innovations in Dataflow and other data analytics products.
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