• Saves 40 hours a month from not having to do troubleshooting 

• Results in zero downtime in a year, compared to several times a year in the past

• Eliminates loss of mission-critical emails that resulted in business loss

Popular Vehicles previously used an on-premise email platform, but had met with a few critical challenges that hindered the productivity of employees, while placing its security posture at risk. The team often faced email-related issues, and mail delivery failures, which included the loss of business-critical emails. “We faced security issues with spam and phishing emails reaching end-users, which was causing potential financial loss and hence was proving to be detrimental to the business,” explains Burby, adding that the frequency of service downtime was only increasing, making it difficult for employees to do their jobs and be productive.

These events prompted the company to look for more reliable solutions before eventually deciding on Google Workspace as the solution of choice, due to the simplicity of the Google licensing model, which gave the team access to all the tools they needed with just one license. They reached out to Google Cloud and partner Shivaami for support in evaluating the product and devising a clear transition path to Google Workspace from its incumbent solution provider.

“Google Workspace stood out among the other competitors given its reputation in the industry for being one of the most secure platforms. The best part is that with a single license of Google Workspace, all our employee productivity needs are fulfilled. Even for administration purposes, we now can manage all the users, apps, accesses and identities from a single pane of glass,” says Burby.

On a typical workday, the team uses Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and have also moved to Google Meet as the default meeting place. Having everything accessible with just a single login has made collaboration a much more seamless and integrated experience. 

In the past, Popular Vehicles had to juggle between multiple productivity tools that were not connected with one another. For example, scheduling team meetings used to be a chore as employees needed to secure a slot in their colleagues’ calendars without full visibility. 

“Before, you’d be calling every participant individually to get their available dates, then send out multiple emails to confirm before finalizing the meeting time. It was tedious and time consuming,” says Burby. “Now, we can see everyone’s availability on Calendar and immediately schedule a meeting for a time that works for everyone.” 

With the previous email provider, frequent downtimes would require the IT personnel to spend up to 40 hours a month troubleshooting. Since implementing Google Workspace, the organization hasn’t seen any downtime. Today, employees can spend their time more effectively by focusing on projects that support business growth.

In order to create a seamless migration to Google Workspace, partner Shivaami helped create an implementation plan, supporting at every step with clear milestone-based timelines.

“The team was knowledgeable and understood our business needs and internal policies very well,” explains Burby. “This made the transition really easy for us, and we were able to complete the migration without any data loss or any business downtime.” 

The high level of online support and literature on Google Workspace made it easy for the IT team to set up and configure accounts as required, implementing different features as required. 

As for the adoption of the new tools, Shivaami conducted several training sessions across the country, so that our employees could learn more about the technology and be more productive. Most of these sessions were conducted online with the help of Google Meet,” says Burby. “Thanks to the popularity and widespread adoption of tools like Gmail, Drive, Meet etc, our employees were able to quickly adopt and start using these tools.”

Only in its first year with Google Workspace, Popular Vehicles is already getting started with the suite of Google products available. However, Burby is confident that the organization will soon be adopting more features to improve and grow the business. 

“We are already using Sites to build microsites across different companies within the group, and will continue to do so. The ease of use that allows people to build aesthetically pleasing and functional websites without any coding background is especially helpful,” says Burby.

For Popular Vehicles, the move to Google Workspace has given the team more than they had signed up for. “The services we benefit from deploying Google Workspace go beyond just the mail services, which was what prompted us to move in the first place,” says Burby. “Google is continuously doing research and upgrading their services with better features, and all of these improvements benefit us as users, helping us not only improve, but transform the way we do business.”