About Usha Martin

Founded more than 50 years ago and headquartered in Kolkata, India, Usha Martin is a leading steel and wire rope manufacturer. The company’s products are used in sectors such as oil and gas, aerial haulage, and general engineering.

Industries: Manufacturing

Location: India

Usha Martin operates several wire and rope manufacturing plants in India, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In 1974, Usha Martin established an integrated alloy steel plant in Jamshedpur, India.

The business operates a range of joint ventures internationally, including a partnership with Joh Pengg AG of Austria to produce oil-tempered wire for the automotive industry and a venture with TESAC of Japan to manufacture and sell specialized wire rope.

Usha Martin’s ICT strategy had traditionally been highly localized, with independent IT infrastructures in all the manufacturing plants and businesses globally. These infrastructures were not integrated, leading to extensive duplication of effort and activities across the business.

In 2016, Usha Martin corporate started a project to integrate ICT across the business and establish centralized financial and technology controls.

“We established a program to integrate our communications infrastructure, security policies, and software licenses and implement a centralized enterprise resource planning system across our business,” says Jayanta Bhowmik, SVP-IT and CIO, Usha Martin. This program is being initiated primarily in Usha Martin’s Indian businesses before being extended to international markets.

In parallel with these initiatives, Usha Martin decided to consolidate the disparate email infrastructures and systems used by its corporate team, plants, and business units.

“We faced security threats and control problems managing and interconnecting all our very different email systems,” Bhowmik says.

“For example, we experienced on average about three to four ransomware attacks every year. We decided there was no alternative but to deploy a centralized email system.”

Usha Martin weighed its options and went so far as to purchase a license to run a single email system on its in-house infrastructure. However, the challenges of migrating a 4,000-strong workforce from up to seven existing email systems to an in-house platform proved difficult to overcome.

“We would have had to plan for server infrastructure, backups, security, and disaster recovery and execute smoothly, which would have been a time-consuming, expensive exercise,” Bhowmik says. “We estimated an in-house deployment would take seven to eight months to complete.”

“We looked at cloud-based services and Google presented a unique opportunity for us to consolidate our email without having to plan for our own infrastructure and worry about project planning, architectures, and deployment,” Bhowmik says.

“We also considered another service, but realized Google also gave us the opportunity to move our personal productivity applications to G Suite.”

A competitive evaluation regarding hosting and disaster recovery confirmed Usha Martin’s positive impressions. Google technology and processes in these areas outstripped the capabilities of the company’s own data centers.

“Google came up with a migration timeline and process that met our needs, with an expert partner to ease the transition,” Bhowmik says. “This was extremely important as the change represented a paradigm shift for a business that is very traditional and conservative.”

The Google partner worked closely with the internal Usha Martin team to complete phase one of the migration to the senior executive team. The partner also undertook training and worked with the IT team to hold meetings at various plants and locations to explain the changes. In addition, the partner conducted a skills transfer exercise to enable Usha Martin team members to complete the remaining phases of the project.

The business migrated the 1,500 team members in its Indian operations, as well as those in its Austrian joint venture, to the new platform.

“Using Google gives us wonderful alternatives to traditional systems,” Bhowmik says. “For example, using Google Hangouts Meet for video calls means we can reduce the number of video conferences that occupy large rooms and help ensure there are enough time-slots to meet demand.”

Improved Security of Information and Systems

One of the key differences between Usha Martin’s existing email systems and Gmail is the improvement in security and online safety.

“We had an anti-spam engine but, despite this, our employees received a lot of spam emails and messages carrying ransomware viruses,” Bhowmik says.

“With G Suite, we don’t receive these messages anymore and we minimize the risk of our network being compromised by malicious infections that could prevent us from accessing our files.”

Using G Suite has reduced team members’ use of USB drives to share large files that would otherwise be blocked due to email attachment limits.

“In addition, people are reducing the practice of printing documents for meetings. One person in each meeting can now steer and control documents, reducing duplication and the possibility of errors.”

“Document sharing is now happening much more in the cloud rather than through external media, improving control and security,” Bhowmik says.

Manage Calendars More Effectively

G Suite now enables Usha Martin team members to manage their calendars more effectively and share documents with multiple people without having to aggregate feedback or manage version control.

“Thanks to G Suite, our people are coming into a world of collaboration and modernization,” Bhowmik says.

In 1984, Mario Maio set up a small business manufacturing electrical transformers in his Johannesburg garage. Over the next two decades, the ACDC Dynamics company he created came to dominate manufacturing, import, and distribution in South Africa’s electrical goods sector. Then, in 2007, Mario’s son, Ricardo Maio, founded a retail arm to the business, ACDC Express. Today ACDC Express is South Africa’s largest electrical retail franchise, with 29 franchise stores across the country. Eight of those franchises joined in 2017 alone, and ACDC Express is experiencing quarter-on-quarter growth of 28% per year.

Rapid expansion increases the demands on the ACDC Express central administration, which provides each franchise with IT support and a full suite of marketing, operational, and bookkeeping functions. So when email server downtime became a frequent problem, Ricardo and his team chose G Suite to transform the way the franchise worked.

“We lost revenue when our email servers went down. When I researched Google’s SLA of 99.9% uptime and experimented with G Suite on my private Gmail account, I could see the difference this technology could create.”

Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express

“On consecutive occasions, our entire email server went down,” says Ricardo Maio, CEO at ACDC Express. “It would take more than one or two days to bring it back up. We had already highlighted software cost overhead as a potential thing to reduce, so when that happened several times within a short period, we knew it was time to make a change.”

Building a better franchise

Franchise businesses undergoing rapid expansion must respond quickly to the demands of new stores. At ACDC Express, 33 staff run the national franchise, delivering core services and support to 29 franchises across the country. Key tasks, such as updating the operations manual, were hampered by a reliance on paper forms and mail services, while email servers experienced repeat failures, which compromised communication. By implementing new, cloud-based productivity tools, ACDC Express looked to cut down on slow and expensive practises, and deliver an agile, reliable online communications platform.

To do that, ACDC Express migrated its franchise to G Suite with Opennetworks. “We lost revenue when our email servers went down,” says Ricardo. “When I researched Google’s SLA of 99.9% uptime and experimented with G Suite on my private Gmail account, I could see the difference this technology could create.”

Since moving to Gmail, ACDC Express reports that the problem of email server downtime “is no longer existent for us,” while with Google Drive, versioning problems have been resolved. Using surveys on Google Forms, ACDC Express quickly and easily collects data from stores and customers—whether they are in stores or on the road—and populates Google Sheets with the information.

“Our operations manual is a binding document, and it’s a living document that gets regularly updated. In the past, we would struggle to track which franchise had which version. With Google Drive, we can be sure that everyone is looking at the right one.”

Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express

With Google Data Studio, the managing team then consolidates that data on dashboards, creating snapshots of performance, complete with averages and simple comparisons, which make it easy to spot issues and outliers in need of attention. Individual businesses that do require help are then contacted over Google Hangouts Meet to assess what they need, part of a culture of sharing expertise, which Ricardo sees as key to the franchise mode.

“As a franchise, sharing knowledge is as important as maintaining control,” he says. “If there’s a new procedure or system that worked in one store, we can immediately update our manuals and documentation so that everyone has access to it. That’s been fantastic.”

“Our operations manual is a binding document, and it’s a living document, which gets regularly updated,” says Ricardo. “In the past, we would struggle to track which franchise had which version, and every time we had to make a change we would print out a version and send it to stores through an unreliable postal service. With Google Drive, we can be sure that everyone is looking at the right one.”

Remote training, rapid migration

Rolling out new IT tools across a franchise is often expensive, demanding extensive travel and numerous training sessions, which often repeat the same material. Instead, ACDC Express set up training on Google Hangouts that staff could drop into at their convenience, creating a cost-effective training schedule, which meant individual stores could plan their own learning process.

“When we moved to G Suite, we did it all at once, with every employee changing at the same time. We took a band-aid approach, switching to the new tools as rapidly as possible. After six months of training, there have been no reported problems with G Suite at all.”

Ricardo Maio, CEO, ACDC Express

“The whole benefit of franchising is that you can learn from your peers,” says Ricardo. “When we moved to G Suite, we did it all at once, with every employee changing at the same time. We took a band-aid approach, switching to the new tools as rapidly as possible. After six months of training, there have been no reported problems with G Suite at all.”

More mobile, more reliable

Today, ACDC Express operates 240 Google accounts, and information from the franchises’ marketing systems, research, operations, and accounting is fed back automatically to Google Sheets and Google Dashboard at the headquarters in Edenvale, Gauteng. By Ricardo’s estimation, the administrative team is now so effective with G Suite tools, it can achieve twice as much as it could without them.

Now, ACDC Express is looking to use Google Chromebooks in a new web-based point-of-sale system, and considering moving its ERP onto Google Cloud Platform for greater stability, in another project with Opennetworks.

“We’ve developed an in-house point of sale system that’s web-based and can use a functional touchscreen,” adds Ricardo. “We’re looking at rolling that out with Google Chromebooks. We really like how straightforward and simple the Google Chrome devices are, and because we’ve taken a lot of infrastructure into the cloud, we no longer actually need physical machines on our counters. We can work anywhere. That’s something that applies from our head office right down to our smallest franchise store.”

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.”

Among Indian courier and logistics businesses, DTDC has expanded rapidly since its foundation in 1990. Starting with seed capital of less than US$2,000, DTDC has grown to a US$175 million business with operations across the country and internationally.

The business is second only to the government-owned India Post in the courier and logistics sector with 522 offices, more than 10,700 franchisees, and a 5,000 employee-strong workforce.

It handles 450,000 shipments—primarily small to medium parcels—per day, has a direct presence in 12 countries, a presence through associates in 22 countries, and operates 16 gateway hubs.

DTDC’s mission is to become India’s preferred express parcel provider with a focus on the consumer and the company aims to be valued at INR 5,000 crore (about US$778 million) by 2020.

However, like all businesses in the courier and logistics sector, DTDC is facing greater competition. Most of the large ecommerce businesses in the country have created their own express delivery arms and these are contributing to heightened customer expectations.

“Businesses and consumers want information and answers now rather than later today or tomorrow,” Mrinal Chakraborty, Executive Vice President, Technology and Innovation, DTDC, says.

“For example, customers are looking for direct API integration between their systems and our tracking tools, rather than a mundane, old-style MIS-driven approach.

“The express delivery businesses themselves are eager to embrace trends such as increased predictability of delivery, greater capacity utilization, and how vehicles can be run in the most efficient way possible.”

External-facing Technology Policies

DTDC had operated a traditional technology operation including in-house infrastructure located in a mid-sized data centre at its Bangalore headquarters. This in-house data centre housed a completely virtualised server-storage environment and connected to all 522 offices by MPLS link or internet-based VPN services. The business also operated a small disaster recovery facility in another city in India.

However, DTDC realised its technology operation could not deliver the agility, flexibility, and performance needed for the business to thrive in a highly disrupted industry.

Its technology leaders started reviewing their options and in early 2017 adopted a policy that embraced external models such as public cloud services. The business moved its SAP HANA relational database management into the cloud and now is considering using Google Cloud Platform to host its core enterprise resource planning system.

Google Cloud Platform also gives DTDC the ability to analyse data in order to improve the efficiency and predictability of its services.

An Opportunity for Change

While the business had implemented cloud-based office productivity applications in 2016, these applications were not meeting its needs, Chakraborty says.

“What we observed after three years, despite a considerable cost, these applications were only being used for email rather than as a full suite of collaboration tools,” he says.

“For example, if a simple presentation file needed to be delivered for decision-making, it had to be sent to about 20 stakeholders,” he adds. “We would then have to collect feedback from each and aggregate it into a final draft. This approach compromised productivity and decision-making, and meant multiple versions of data were circulating within the organisation.”

DTDC also wanted to extend mobility from a small group within the business to the wider organisation as part of a broader project to improve collaboration, productivity, and decision-making. In addition, the business intended to improve the usability and relevance of its intranets to its employees.

Furthermore, Chakraborty and his team planned to help improve collaboration within and the performance of DTDC’s more than 10,700 franchisees in responding to customer needs.

G Suite Targeted to Increase Collaboration

Based on his previous experience with G Suite, Chakraborty recommended the cloud-based suite of intelligent applications to DTDC’s senior management team. He also provided a comprehensive cost-effort-benefit analysis to back up his recommendation.

DTDC had started with a three-week proof of concept exercise spanning 20 users across the business. Having determined that G Suite met its business requirements, the courier and logistics provider had chosen a ‘big bang’ implementation across about 5,000 users.

DTDC switched over to G Suite on 23 June 2017 and undertook an extensive user acceptance and training program—called Project Liberty—over the following two weeks with the assistance of a 24-hours-per-day, seven-days-per-week helpdesk.

“We made hundreds of calls to our employees to explain the move, created and distributed an FAQ, and provided extensive training at regional office and branch office levels,” Chakraborty says. The business also displayed posters and banners at all DTDC offices, sent teaser messages to users, and provided daily G Suite usage tips over a three-week period.

“We completed that part of the move in about six days and by 1 July 2017 we had migrated all databases and all old emails to G Suite. Two weeks later, we had signed off the job,” Chakraborty says.

Considerable Cost Savings

DTDC has reaped several rewards from its move to G Suite. The amount the business spends on video conferencing has fallen from about US$5,000 per month to nearly zero as it takes advantage of the voice and video capabilities of Google Hangouts Meet.

“Largely because the volume of email attachments has fallen dramatically since we moved to Gmail—despite the fact our business has grown significantly—we have not had to upgrade any of our links over the last year or so,” Chakraborty says.

“Team members are increasingly sending links through Google Drive instead.” The ability to store files in the cloud through Google Drive has also enabled DTDC to eliminate the need to perform local backups of users’ files.

Meanwhile, team members are also increasingly using Google Calendar to make appointments and check the availability of colleagues and superiors for meetings.

Supporting Mobilisation with G Suite

Deploying G Suite has also enabled DTDC to increase the number of workers with access to email on their mobile devices from 150 users to more than 4,000 users.

“At our National Franchisee Meeting in Delhi in February 2018, our Chairman explicitly explained in an open forum how significantly his performance had improved since we deployed G Suite and implemented mobility,” Chakraborty says.

With sharing of spreadsheets and documents rising through the use of Google Sheets and Google Docs respectively, DTDC’s employees are collaborating more effectively and making decisions faster and more easily. Several departments within the business are using Google Sites to create intranets to host commonly-accessed documents and provide knowledge bases, including FAQ documents to help employees solve problems themselves.

“Thanks to G Suite, we have experienced a 10-fold increase in the speed of collaboration, decision-making, and supporting systems,” Chakraborty says. “The activities of our management team are more transparent and cohesive while as an organisation we are making decisions in hours and minutes rather than days.”

DTDC has also completed the migration of more than 10,700 franchisees across to G Suite. “Thus DTDC has become one of the few organisations where its Chairman and Managing Director and a small franchisee in a town in India would use the same intelligent applications,” Chakraborty says. “This makes the organisation much flatter, more collaborative operation in nature.

“Furthermore, franchisees who are using G Suite have started telling us that the ease of collaboration and access to information is enabling them to resolve customer queries faster and more effectively.”

Delivering a Bright Future with Google

DTDC plans to continue developing its intranets on Google Sites and encourage further use of Google Docs and Sheets.

“We are continuing to go back to our internal teams to highlight the benefits of these products and drive takeup to create more awareness and enthusiasm,” says Chakraborty.

DTDC has also started evaluating Google’s big data and analytics platform for its internal MIS and dashboard practices. “More broadly, we see Google as key to our ability to realise our business objectives and remain competitive in the dynamic, fast-changing courier and logistics industry,” Chakraborty concludes