As the world’s most comprehensive job site, our goal at Simply Hired is to help people find a job they love. Our 75 employees work with 30M+ job seekers each month as well as thousands of global employers to provide free access to job openings and an efficient way to reach qualified candidates.
Maintaining a database of more than eight million job listings, working with thousands of employers and managing a remote sales team requires a lot of internal organization. In 2011, we started running into issues with our in-house technology implementation. Employees were wasting valuable time dealing with spam and at the same time, storing and saving company information on a single internal drive was limiting mobility and collaboration for the team. We were also concerned about disaster recovery if our system suffered an outage. All of these factors made it clear that another solution was needed.
With Google Apps, our information is now available in the cloud. Thanks to Gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, and more recently, Google Drive, important documents and calendar information is now always up-to-date and accessible to all employees – no matter where they are located or which Web device they are using. When our sales team is on the road, they can now easily access presentations and product information from our internal Google site and send it to potential customers. Accessing data and files without being in the office or connected to a local network has helped us provide a better experience for our customers. And, Google Chat makes it easy to quickly reach a colleague while out of the office or on the road. In addition, moving our data to the cloud helps us save resource allocation toward and disaster recovery procedures.
In addition to accessibility and reliability, sharing information as a team has never been easier. Rather than emailing large attachments, we can easily upload large files to Google Docs or Drive. For example, our marketing team is constantly creating new presentations and collateral which include images and video, resulting in large file sizes. In the past, we’d have to email large files, which created numerous issues including slow upload time and unreliable deliverability. Sometimes, the files would be too large to even send. Now, we can upload materials easily to Docs or Drive and simply click the “Share” button.
With Google Apps there’s a new level of transparency and collaboration among teams at Simply Hired. We’ve also seen a reduction in expenses as fewer resources are needed to manage a cloud-based solution. We look forward to seeing ongoing enhancements from the Google Apps team to further improve productivity across our organization.
O’Neill Hotels & Resorts Ltd.
With our growing portfolio, we needed a better way to provide IT support to each property and to ensure that our corporate team could work together from anywhere. Since we are often traveling to different properties, providing easy and secure access to email, calendars, and documents was a priority. While the hotel industry isn’t known for its use of cutting-edge of technology, we were excited to go against the grain and began exploring cloud-based solutions. Google Apps gave us exactly what we needed.
We use Google Apps to help provide hotels with IT support from our corporate office. We maintain detailed notes and pictures of each hotel’s IT infrastructure in shared Google Docs, so anyone can provide support to the properties at any time. If there’s a network issue, we can easily access information about the property from anywhere – our corporate office, a property location, or even our homes -- to help the hotel immediately resolve the problem. We set up a Google Form for hotels to submit network issues or IT inquiries directly to our team. Form submissions are automatically populated in a shared spreadsheet, and a Google Apps Script helps us automatically respond to basic questions. This process has improved our response time and saved our IT team valuable hours.
Google Apps gives us the tools we need to be more efficient in our back office, so our hotels can stay focused on the front desk and providing the best possible service to their guests.
One of my fondest memories growing up is riding my bike to get ice cream with my family on a hot summer day. For me, it’s exciting to see the local ice cream industry evolve and grow, without losing its charm. Today, ice cream shop owners from around the country are using technology–like Google Apps for Business–to help them run their businesses and reach their customers. From taking their beloved treats on the road to shipping pints across the country, technology is a sweet source of their success.
In celebration of National Ice Cream Day, let’s take a look at how three ice cream shops from around the United States are using technology to scoop up business:
Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams began small, but had big dreams. Jeni Britton Bauer opened her first ice cream shop in Grandview Heights, Ohio in 2002, and turned to Google Apps for Business to help her manage everything from ingredients to employee scheduling. Today, Jeni has grown the business to 10 stores throughout Ohio and Tennessee and has a booming online shipping business, and she depends on Google Apps to help her manage it all. Google Docs helps Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams employees share information from the kitchen with the planning teams on the ground at each location. And it gives her access real-time information to ensure they have the ice cream, packaging and manpower to handle spikes in online orders. Stores are also able to give feedback about each home-made batch of ice cream through a Google Docs form. So if there aren’t enough pecans in the Whiskey Pecan Ice Cream, Jeni’s team can add more in the next batch. Jeni even wrote her best selling cookbook using Google Docs.
Business partners Zach Davis and Kendra Baker knew they wanted to start their exploration in sweet treats with Google Apps. But their journey to get The Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz, California off the ground includes a video they made about spending money locally and rethinking ice cream manufacturing from the ground-up, and a subsequent invitation to the White House to meet the First Lady and the President.
While it might feel natural to drive or bike to your favorite ice cream shop, Coolhaus does things a bit differently. They bring the ice cream to you.
It’s exciting to see how Google Apps has helped these entrepreneurs fulfill their dreams and reach the sweet tooths of so many people. Whether you’re a two-scoops, waffle cone or sundae kind of ice cream lover, celebrate National Ice Cream Day with a sweet treat from your favorite local ice creamery.
“With the transition to Google Apps, the whole academic community, students and staff, have a new, modern working environment. With Google Apps, regardless of time and place, users can access their files and they can share and collaborate simultaneously. We are very interested in innovation and collaboration, so with Google Apps we are ready for the future."