Whirlpool achieves the Next Mile with Google

ANAND Hadgaonkar, CIO, Asia Pacific for Whirlpool Asia LLP

Whirlpool IT’s key strategic imperative is to follow “Cloud First” strategy to improve user collaboration, experience and to improve productivity. Whirlpool India had been using MS Office 2007 and last year when the product was reaching EOL it gave the team an opportunity to explore utilizing this time to implement an innovative idea of promoting usage of Google Suite instead of upgrading to the next version of Office. 

This project named as “Google Next Mile” impacted around 2800 users from all functions across India. This also gives the team to explore new opportunities of adopting browser based end points for its users reducing dependency on OS upgrades, security patch upgrades, simplifying IT Operations, reducing end point refresh cost YoY etc.

Whirlpool Corporation continues to make huge strides toward being a cloud-first organization, supported by ongoing benefits from using Google Cloud’s G Suite productivity applications, including specific features –

    ●    Eliminating the need for version control on presentations using Google Slides.

    ●    Building real-time visual dashboards using Google Sheets; and

    ●    Quickly integrating newly acquired businesses through the ability to immediately begin sharing Google Docs and other information via Google Drive.

The company’s speed of innovation with G Suite continues to grow, thanks to the empowerment of employees who work together to adopt these new tools across internal teams and external partner organizations.

This initiative brought in huge improvement in collaboration as users can collaborate on their files with team members across the geographies, store files in Google Drives rather than local File servers saving on local storage and backup, as well implementing Google Hangout rooms across all locations in the country. The initiative helped the organization by not upgrading to the next version of Office and recover the investment with-in first half year. 

The initiative helped simplify IT Operations by reducing IT incidents count by around 15%, improving user experience and CSAT scores.