Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Jason Bullock, Infrastructure Director at BDP International, a global transportation company with operations in 115 cities throughout the world and a network of subsidiaries in 122 countries. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.
Whether it’s moving a tractor to Jakarta, sending a blood pressure monitor to Milan or putting a beer in someone’s hand, at BDP International, we manage logistics for international transportation from start to finish. We run everything from documentation to shipping, making sure all the regulatory requirements are met along the way. We depend on technology to orchestrate the freight logistics and transportation globally on air, land, and sea, so we need to have an email system that’s dependable and tools that are collaborative.
In the past, we used Microsoft Exchange. Maintaining the Exchange environment was costly, and without significant investment our reliability issues would’ve continued. We needed to be able to monitor the mobile devices that connect to our systems and better predict usage patterns. We considered upgrading our on-premise Exchange environment or moving to the cloud on either Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps for Business. The Exchange upgrade was three to four times more expensive than both cloud options and, while Office 365 offered familiar features, the pricing was not within an acceptable cost structure at the time of our evaluation. Google Apps gave us a complete set of tools for a single per-user fee, with the highest reliability and security overall. In April of this year, Google Apps Reseller Cloud Sherpas helped us move our 3,600 employees over to Google Apps.
Although we’ve only been on Apps for a few months, we are already seeing how Google Apps is helping our employees work better together. First, our compliance team is using a Google Site as an internal regulatory information hub, and our VP of Compliance uses the automatic translation feature in Gmail to communicate with our office in Mexico in seconds, without the hassle of finding a translator or leaving the original message. We moved an entire process around event planning from a paper form to a Google Form, which allows our event coordinator to collect and share all the details with the planning staff seamlessly and much faster than before. Finally, we’ve moved off of our company Blackberries onto Android and iOS smartphones with Google Apps. This allows our teams to work faster since everyone can edit and collaborate in Google Drive from anywhere, while giving our IT team better visibility into our network thanks to the mobile management console.
Moving to Google Apps helps our employees view technology as a tool, not an obstacle, and is making us a more nimble company. We can get work done from anywhere while moving around as freely as our cargo. We had talked about making this happen at BDP for a long time, but Google Apps really helped us kickstart the change.
