Builders Merchants Journal – BMJ Publishing to Builders Merchants and the UK merchanting industry for more than 95 years
Builders merchants group Travis Perkins has embraced the digital world by moving to Google Apps in an effort to rid its business of paper.
The move has helped embrace the efficiency, productivity and mobility of the digital world whilst also maintaining its tradition of building deep relationships with customers.
The company rolled out Google services to 8,000 people at a time across 17 businesses and central functions. The company also trained 2,000 internal Google “champions”, conducting training in person and via Google Hangouts.
Travis Perkin’s group chief information officer, JJ Van Oosten, wrote in his blog: “Google was my natural choice for an innovation partner. Their products promote interaction and collaboration, they understand mobile, inside and out, and their technology is web-based and cloud-based. And Google’s rapid consumer-centric innovation keeps the business moving fast.
“Within a few weeks of contacting Google, we worked to launch our Google Apps gateway and our IT department began using Google Apps. The transformative power of these tools soon became clear. Meetings with my IT team took only 15-20 minutes instead of an hour. We collaborated on documents in Google Docs, so there was no need to review that content when we met – we could focus instead on core issues. The time savings and efficiencies Google enables are undeniable.”
