Usha Martin Consolidates and Modernizes with Google
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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.
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.
Eight Steps to Align Hybrid Work with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Principles
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Many executives across the globe are feeling the effects of a recent pivot to hybrid work models. This massive transition represents a significant departure from existing office culture. As business leaders look to operationalize their flexible work model infrastructure, they’re also evaluating what it takes to attract and retain employees in this new landscape. Instead of seeing these as separate initiatives, business leaders have a unique opportunity to collectively overhaul corporate culture, focusing on hybrid work and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies in tandem.
Combining DEI and hybrid work strategies provides a more inclusive culture
Focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion doesn’t mean business leaders are offering an underrepresented individual a specific role or platform because they fit a certain demographic category. Lack of job quality criteria leads to animosity and cultural inequality. Here, diversity means creating a meritocracy with equal pay and equal opportunity for all.
Organizations that thoughtfully combine DEI and hybrid work strategies will produce cultures that improve employee experience and business agility. Integrated DEI and hybrid workplace support better business outcomes by:
Increasing the total available talent pool. A business must cast a wide net for candidates by expanding how and where it searches. Adding a flexible work schedule policy expands potential talent by allowing parents, caregivers, and others to select the hours that work best for their family obligations. Remote work also holds a higher priority in job seekers’ desires. For example, a FlexJobs survey revealed that 24% of workers say the ability to work from home is so important to them that they are willing to take a 10-20% pay cut to work remotely, and 21% would give up some vacation time.
Creating a more inclusive culture. Job seekers want to work for companies that prioritize DEI. According to a recent CNBC and SurveyMonkey Workforce survey, nearly 80% of workers say that they want to work for a company that values diversity, equity, and inclusion. A DEI-centric work culture allows job seekers to feel like there’s a place for them.
Fostering innovation and profitability with broader perspectives. In general, diversity and inclusion promotes the expression of ideas from people with different backgrounds, leading to breakthroughs in creativity, innovation, and attracting new customers. Workplace DEI programs create an employee base that closely mirrors a customer base. A diverse team is less likely to miss potential market opportunities if representative of a broad range of ethnicity, race, age, assigned sex, and socioeconomic backgrounds. A 2020 McKinsey analysis found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity on executive teams were 36% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile.
Hybrid work should not derail DEI efforts
While there are numerous benefits to integrating DEI and hybrid work strategies, it would be naive to think it won’t bring challenges. Businesses run the risk of creating new inequities and exacerbating existing ones as they move to hybrid models. One potential issue lies in which employees can work remotely. An HBR article shared how pre-Covid less than 30% of all workers could work from home; only 16% of Latinx workers and 19% of Black workers had remote flexibility, compared to 37% of Asian workers and 30% of white workers.
Even for employees who can work remotely, it’s essential to eliminate “proximity bias.” A study by SHRM found that 67% of surveyed supervisors admitted to considering remote workers more easily replaceable than onsite workers at their organization. Additionally, 72% said they would prefer all of their teams to be working in the office.
A successful hybrid environment strikes a balance between flexibility and inclusivity where individuals feel valued, and everyone has equal opportunities for advancement. In another study, researchers concluded that remote workers and office workers were promoted at the same rate, but found that remote workers’ salaries grew more slowly. Leading companies recognize that physically being at the office full-time isn’t necessary to produce great results.
8 steps to creating a diverse hybrid work culture
As DEI becomes a new business imperative, organizations must work to minimize unconscious bias, creating market-based salaries for all workers, and introducing educational programs that support talent development. Here are some concrete steps you can take to get started.
- Educate current and future leaders on DEI and hybrid work issues. As you build hybrid work strategies, it’s crucial to discover and understand unconscious biases. According to Deloitte, companies need a holistic DEI learning strategy, including unconscious bias training and developing the conditions for long-term behavior changes.
- Embrace tools that support DEI and hybrid workplaces. Organizations can leverage technology and AI-enabled HR software to support their efforts. Collaboration tools provide everyone with a voice regardless of where they are (for example, using Spaces for team chats in Google Workspace so that everyone has access to the same information). Video call features such as transcriptions and translation can help the hearing-and-vision-impaired and employees who speak different languages. It’s also possible to purchase recruiting solutions with AI technology to reduce the chance of bias or discrimination when reviewing candidates.
- Strengthen culture by marrying DEI with meritocracy. There should also be explicit guidelines to ensure the systems and processes for hiring and promoting individuals are both transparent and equitable. One method for accomplishing this goal is to define detailed job requirements and metrics per role to understand what skills are associated with specific functions. It’s also essential to ensure you’ve designed these processes in a way that screens out bias. Leading companies will deploy analytics tools to evaluate the systems’ fairness and track if the systems are progressing against diversity targets.
- Create upskilling programs to train employees. Many organizations struggle to find talent with the right skill sets. One solution to this problem is to invest in educating existing employees. Companies must develop diverse talent at every level to create a pipeline of candidates that progresses into senior management. Similar to the way companies offered management training programs to college graduates, organizations should design programs that provide skills enhancement for entry and mid-level employees. Almost every job will require a certain level of technical skill—organizations must upskill existing talent.
- Restructure compensation before employees leave. It’s easier to retain an employee than to onboard and train a new hire. According to the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s wage growth tracker, wages for people who have switched jobs have outpaced those who’ve stayed at one employer since 2011. One way to retain talent is to right-size salaries to a competitive market rate.
- Remember that money isn’t everything. While individuals may switch jobs for money, they often stay in a position for the culture. Creating a leading employee experience helps organizations keep talent. Work from home programs, flexible work schedules, and advanced programs such as childcare benefits help build the foundation. But increasingly, individuals are looking for a sense of belonging. According to research from McKinsey, employees who feel included are three times more likely to report being excited about working for their organization and committed to its success. Another McKinsey report focusing on attrition shows that employees primarily leave companies because they don’t feel valued or don’t have a sense of belonging.
- Don’t forget to commit the resources. Most organizations built their cultures before DEI and hybrid work were requirements. These companies must invest in new work tools and educational programs, and create new hiring and talent management practices. A business can make a more significant impact with fewer resources by ensuring purchases and processes support flexible and inclusive work cultures.
- Make sure actions are backed up with DEI transparency measurements. The pressure to support DEI could lead to situations where activities are celebrated over results. While it’s not easy to be vulnerable and transparent about where the problems exist, employers should take stock of where they are today. They should present this authentically, create goals for the future, and design a measurable action plan to track its progress. With so many variables and unknowns, it’s crucial for talent leaders to track the way that hybrid work and DEI efforts advance.
Diversity should be part of your efforts because it’s the culture you want to create. However, ignoring diversity efforts can also come with ramifications. For example, Goldman Sachs announced in 2021 that the firm would only underwrite IPOs in the United States and Europe for companies with at least two diverse board members. Meanwhile, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted new rules this summer that require Nasdaq-listed companies to have at least two diverse directors – including one woman and at least one member of an underrepresented community.
In order for the benefits of diversity to emerge in the workplace, companies need to enact cultural and behavioral change. As stated in the ICSM report, “Never become too comfortable with your efforts, as there is always room for improvement with diversity at your organization, whether you see it or not.” It’s clear that what organizations have done to attract talent in the past isn’t resonating the same way today. A diverse workforce delivers better ideas and stronger communities, building deeper relationships with customers along the way. Moving forward, it’s expected that a company’s investment in a diverse, inclusive, and hybrid work culture will set it apart from its competition, leading to increased business agility and better financial outcomes.
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Workspace: Embedding Inclusion and Equity throughout Product Design and Development
Google’s products are built for everyone! Watch the video to hear what the experts at Google say about embedding inclusion throughout the design to product development process, and how Google Workspace is built on product equity principles that takes into consideration the challenges and requirements of users across demographics.
An Insider’s Guide on the Future of Collaboration and Productivity
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As Google’s productivity adviser, I’ve been closely following the evolving discussion around the future of work. Long before the pandemic, employees, business leaders, and analysts were already thinking about how work needed to evolve, but the crisis brought the future cascading into the present. Virtually overnight, millions of companies and workers went remote and stayed that way for over a year, pushing their collaboration and productivity tools to the test across living rooms and time zones. While some organizations were able to launch new solutions or adapt existing ones to keep their people connected and productive, many struggled.
The organizations that struggled quickly discovered their tools weren’t complete, scalable, secure, or built for the cloud era. Meanwhile, across all industries and business types, employees reported spikes in burnout, feelings of disconnection, and frustration with finding the latest information or using unfamiliar tools.
With many businesses headed into a hybrid model, the world of work has been transformed, possibly forever. There’s a fresh and fast-moving conversation about how organizations can succeed within the evolving future of work.
But at the center of that discussion are two familiar topics: collaboration and productivity. How will they evolve in an era of distributed teams and surging employee demand for flexibility? And how will businesses meet expectations to innovate quickly and deliver on rising customer expectations while navigating the new future of work?
Although 2020 was a major inflection point, a closer look reveals that many of the technologies, trends, and cultural norms shaping the future of work have been around for some time. For years, forward-thinking organizations have been wrestling with how to maximize collaboration, productivity, and wellbeing among their employees, and they’ve been developing the tools to make it happen at scale. By that measure, the future of work has been here for some time; it just hasn’t been evenly distributed or easily visible.
With this context in mind, we’re sharing our new guide Create what’s next: The future of collaboration and productivity, which highlights three areas of focus for organizations wanting to catch up with those leading the charge to empower the future of work.
- Making work-from-anywhere a reality with flexible solutions
- Giving people helpful tools to maximize their impact
- Enabling knowledge sharing and human connection
Armed with these three strategies, businesses can improve productivity and encourage innovation while better meeting the needs of their customers and their employees—now and in the years ahead.
We share some highlights from the guide in the infographic below (click to enlarge). You can also download the full guide now.
Google’s Intelligent Products Essentials Assist Manufacturers in Product Development Journey
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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.
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When it comes to data analysis, it’s easy to fall into routine. But no matter how much of a whiz you are at formulas or pivot tables, superb spreadsheet skills only take you so far if you’re working with multiple versions or outdated datasets.
On average, your employees spend up to eight hours each week—an entire work day—searching for and consolidating information.
What if businesses spent their time applying data insights instead of tracking them down?
Working in the cloud means your data can easily stay up to date because information is automatically saved as it’s typed. Multiple team members can collaborate in real-time from their phone, tablet or computer (online and offline) and create a single source of truth for projects, like quarterly budgets.
Powered by Google’s machine intelligence, Sheets does a lot
of the heavy
lifting for you when it comes to data analysis. You can ask a question
about your data and Sheets will return an answer using natural language
processing. Sheets also builds
charts, suggests
formulas and creates
pivot tables for you.
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