Lower Cost for Easy and Accessible IT

One of our clients discovered that the IT systems in all of their 102 stores and 5 distribution centers, including the corporate headquarters, was starting to get outdated.  More particularly, the cost of upgrading the existing email messaging platform was going to exceed the budget.  Our suggestion was to move to Google Apps, which worked with employees’ existing email client software.  This upgrade also eliminated additional hardware investments in servers.  Google Apps includes Spam filtering and email archival, which allowed the company to manage email without investing in a new in-house server.  Typically moving to Google Apps over a similar in house Microsoft solution will cost a third less per employee.  To further help with the budget, we helped the client develop and implement a SaaS strategy to help reduce total IT budget.

We live by the mantra of simplifying IT.  By switching to Google Apps, its an interface that is easily used and understood by our client’s employees.  Training the employees on the new system was next to zero.  Google Apps is also an easy tool for creating team project websites.  When we had that tool up, we saw that our client’s employees started building websites around projects they were working on.  For example, one of our client’s projects  was to have trainers at the stores who would illustrate how to use particular equipment by going through a training with every customer interested in buying the product.  This idea was great, but trainers had to switch to multiple locations during the day and it was almost impossible to coordinate schedules for all of them via email.  Without any help of IT, our client’s employees were able to utilize Google Apps, create a trainer management website, facilitate all of the schedules, calendars, and forms that were needed for this service, and use this website as CRM tool. We gave our client simple, easy and accessible tools that can be used by any user, and not just IT staff.