Stepping Into The Modern Working Culture By Adopting the Google Workspace

Summary

Two years since Toitsu Co., Ltd. began incorporating Google Workspace in their daily workflow, they have successfully transitioned from traditional to digital workflow! Here are the challenges they faced, and the successes they achieved by going digital.

Client information

Company name	Toitsu Co., Ltd.
Company profile	Toitsu Corporation is a long standing building materials distributor based in Ota-ku, Tokyo, who celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2017. They operate a sawmill and serve various construction professionals and homeowners, offering lumber and building materials for home fixtures. Additionally. Toitsu Co., Ltd., takes part in remodelling and renovation projects too.
Industry	Manufacturing, Retail, Services, etc.
Company size	Less than 50 people
Introduction date	January 2021

Challenges

Set to Overcome Outdated Systems with Enhanced Efficiency

Previously, Toitsu Co., Ltd. battled old outdated systems for some time and it led to being inefficient overtime. When they realised this, a decision was made to retire their old HP systems and to upgrade their entire internal and external systems. However, with no internal IT staff, a cloud computing system was a clear choice. This led them to TS Cloud who introduced Google Workspace.

The Transition from Analog to Digital Scheduling

Prior to the introduction of Google Workspace, staff mainly shared their schedules in an analog way, though WOM or on paper. There was a culture in the office to distribute printed schedules to everybody, notify them again when changes were made, and then rewrite them manually.This was noticed to be extremely inefficient. Toitsu recognized the necessity for tools that could facilitate instant collaborating editing and sharing of any schedule or document.

Searching For Convenient, Accessible Email Management

In the past, Outlook was used for email which proved to be inflexible and inefficient. It only worked on specific devices and searching for old emails was troublesome. Hence, this too resulted in inefficient operation.

Solution By TS Cloud

Simple Digital Tool Adoption and Streamlined IT Management

Despite initial concerns about the management of domains and settings, collaboration with TS Cloud made the implementation of Google Workspace extremely smooth. The user friendly interface of Google Workspace’s management dashboard allowed Toitsu’s staff to effortlessly navigate it no matter the inexperience in IT skills.

Additionally, TS Cloud’s aid in system education was highly insightful. They taught us default system settings and features, and solve our problem of data loss. For example, Google Docs and Spreadsheets are automatically saved to the cloud and using it provides peace of mind because “PC Freezes” and “Data Losses” were gone.

Seamless Staff Scheduling With Google Calendar

Google Calendar’s shared and individual calendars were an effective solution to our past problem of staff scheduling. Now, understanding staff schedules is so much easier because changes are reflected immediately. In addition to that, it is now common practice to manage personal schedules on individual calendars, and check company-wide schedules on a shared calendar. Being able to break away from analog methods and transition to digital is a major step forward for the company as a whole.

Gmail for Universal Email Access and Efficient Operation

After using Gmail, staff members could check their emails by simply logging into their account from their PC or smartphone without any special settings, and operations performed on any device are always synchronised. Undeniably, transition to the new system was smooth, and simultaneously made email operations much smoother.

Although there was a confusion by the differences in the operations between Outlook and Gmail, today Gmail is a God send. Unique labels and archiving helps everyone keep their mailbox extremely neat and organised, while the Google Workspace tools integrate so well together which allows us to save everything to Drive.

Result and Benefits

Today, each of Toitsu’s staff has a Google Workspace account and al of them watched an induction video before starting its use. This way, everyone will be able to use calendars, email, Drive, etc. For our company, we feel that introducing Google Workspace has led to positive growth and results in every aspect.

Looking forward, we aim to further improve operational efficiency using Google’s tools. Such as using Google Forms as our new customer registration platform. Additionally, there are many other companies’ products that can be linked with Google accounts, including Slack, which we have started using as a way to communicate between staff.

Therefore, as Google Workspace has many features that have yet to be used, using them to actively improve and create a better work environment is always happening.

Customer Review

”We’ve found TS Cloud’s newsletters to be highly useful. Occasionally there may be updates that have been made without you noticing, or operational queries that may not be answered right away. Hence thanks to the email newsletters, we learn about new features and how to use them with every update all the time. If there is a question while using it on a daily basis, I may feel that it’s not worth asking and ignore it so I’m grateful that I can gain knowledge later through the e-mail newsletter.”