Laurel and
Google Workspace
During the implementation process, Master Concept ensured the transfer path was clear right from the preliminary PoC stage and resolved the difficulties of transfer caused by dated servers by way of batch-by-batch transfer. By doing so, Master Concept helped the client complete the digitalization transformation to Google Cloud services without a hitch.
Story Highlight
Overview
Founded in 1970, LAUREL Corp. is a food company headquartered in Taiwan mainly producing frozen foods including the LAUREL Tangyuan series and LAUREL food ingredients for Japanese-style hot pots.
Difficulties and Challenges
Until a few years ago, LAUREL still used the Exchange 2003 email system to send and receive mail. Since the Exchange 2003 entered its seventeenth year, it could barely meet user demands in terms of practicality, stability, and convenience. Additionally, before the implementation of the Google Cloud solution, LAUREL stored all of its internal documents, data, and emails in the on-premises servers which are dated and had derivative leakage that exposed the company data to long-term risks. As such, LAUREL’s IT team in 2020 officially started to consider transferring on-premises servers to the cloud while implementing Google Workspace to replace Exchange 2003 and allow colleagues to execute work tasks with more efficiency and security.
In fact, besides the problems caused by dated email systems and servers, insufficient on-premises storage was also a major challenge for LAUREL. For a long while, LAUREL relied on hypermarkets and supermarkets as its primary sales channels, without setting up independent sales departments. So the sales team had to travel frequently on business and relied on emails to communicate with clients, which led to huge demands for mass data/email transmission. In the past, LAURELs 200 employees saved all emails and operation data in the on-premises servers resulting in insufficient online mail storage. With insufficient server storage, the sales personnel had to download some of their emails and save them onto the computer or other hard drive devices in order to release storage space.
Such an operation is not only time-consuming but also cumbersome in practice because when the sales personnel are outside the company and need to review previous emails, these emails could have been downloaded and saved to other devices and therefore, unable to be retrieved, causing hindrance and inflexibility at work.
Implementing Google Workspace solutions
To resolve the above problems, LAUREL’s IT team opted for “cloud” and “more user-friendly” systems and started to team up with Master Concept, a Google Cloud Premier Partner by implementing Google Workspace. The goal is to resolve the issues of insufficient on-premises storage, dated email systems, time-consuming mail sending/receiving/saving, and ineffective communication and documents exchange.
Old and new systems ran simultaneously to ensure smoother cloud migration
As the Exchange 2003, email server is dated and not supported by any back-up system, Master Concept first affirmed the maximum system capacity for simultaneous operation, conducted tests/verifications, streamlined all technical procedures, and worked up a precisely estimated rundown to ensure a smooth migration during the evaluation. Further, since LAUREL is a food manufacturer/retailer, they would not want to have its employees affected by the migration. Accordingly, Master Concept formulated a “Double Mail Correspondence Plan”, through which the existing mail system could run at the same time with Google Workspace and switched to the Google Workspace setting only after all emails, documents and data were completely transferred. This migration process took only four days without hindering the employees from receiving or sending emails at all. During the launch month, LAUREL’s entire workforce received online and physical Google Workspace training from Master Concept to ensure a hassle-free transition.
Team collaboration and real time data updates
Besides resolving the problem of dated email systems and insufficient storage, LAUREL conducted collaborative coordination for daily tasks performance via Google Document/Sheet after using Google Workspace. Previously, LAUREL’s employees had to compile a great number of operation sheets, marketing event proposals on a daily basis and email them to the general manager as well as other departments for inspection. As the above was not completed via online document tools, the document content could go missing during the back-and-forth correspondence or content amendment might be difficult to put into practice when necessary.
After the implementation, the online tools in Google Workspace have benefited LAUREL in their daily operation. With shared online editing, internal communication has become more efficient. In particular, the fact that data can be directly stored on cloud has given supervisors at all levels and in all departments real-time data access. No need to send documents back and forth while occupying storage space. Data can be saved in a centralized cloud drive for shared viewing.
Results and Benefits
It took only six weeks for Master Concept to complete the whole process of implementing Google Workspace to LAUREL, which is half of the time estimated. The entire email and data migration took only four days. As a Cloud technology consultant, Master Concept provides the following services: (1) Account setup and data connection – assisting LAUREL’s 200 employees with account setup, data transfer including emails, and contacts, calendar; (2) Seamless migration – the old and new systems could run simultaneously and allow employees to carry on work as usual during the email/data transfer process; (3) Employee training – arranged lectures and workshops to continuously update information for users and offer them more diverse coordination tools to improve efficiency and competitiveness.
• “Double Mail Correspondence Plan” allows the employees to carry on with their office tasks during the migration process
• Migration process took only 4 days
• Google online tools improve efficiency with collaboration and real-time data updates