Posted by Meheriar Patel, Chief Information Officer, USV Limited
Editor's note: Today’s post comes from guest blogger Meheriar Patel, Chief Information Officer of USV Limited, a healthcare company from India. See what other organisations that have gone Google have to say, and find USV Limited’s full story here.
At USV Limited (USV), we’ve been in the business of pharmaceuticals for more than half a century. Today, more than 4,000 employees work in six offices and four plants in India, manufacturing and marketing our products to 75 countries around the world. We believe that the key for us to succeed in the highly competitive healthcare industry is to constantly innovate on internal collaboration, operational processes and research capabilities. Technology is key to delivering faster market response.
A few years ago, we realised our client-server email system, which we had developed in-house, was inefficient. Our IT team spent too much time trying to overcome storage and bandwidth limitations and hardware breakdowns. Productivity was hit hard as employees lost emails. It was definitely time for us to look for a better way to foster internal collaboration and support growing employee demand for mobile email access.
Google Apps for Work stood out as the ideal solution to achieve our productivity goals. We rolled it out swiftly in all areas of the business, from manufacturing to office operations. Employees found Google Apps for Work very easy to use, while Google's 99.9% uptime guarantees us peace of mind.
Employees appreciate the flexibility they have when it comes to accessing and sharing emails and documents from anywhere, whether they’re on their laptops, tablets and smartphones. We can access business-critical information more quickly too. With our previous in-house system, sales reports used to take us at least 10 days to complete. Now, by sharing sales information in Google Drive, our employees update and analyse sales performance in real-time, and respond to customer demands faster.
We found
Google Sites and
Hangouts to be great employee-connectors, and morale boosters too. We use templates in Sites to develop internal websites with just a few clicks. Employees can upgrade their skills when they choose with the educational resources shared on Sites. Google Hangouts saves us travel time and costs by connecting everyone in multiple cities and locations. With the “screenshare” feature, we edit documents in Drive and make critical decisions on-the-spot.
Our IT Department also experiences greater benefit from the highly secure system. Google’s Apps Script helps us automate the logging of all IT actions, a requirement for any company operating in a regulated environment. Our IT team now focuses on enhancing the customer experience instead of low-value tasks like spam control and updating security software.
At USV, we believe that successful healthcare companies must continue improving themselves. We are looking for new ways to move forward, with further process automation to connecting with channels and customers directly. And we believe that Google for Work helps us secure long-term benefits for our employees and customers.
