Trimble lays the foundation for digital transformation with Google Workspace

Trimble, an industrial technology company, empowers our customers and employees to work in new ways. By bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds, our core technologies power an interconnected world of work. But as we’ve grown rapidly through company acquisitions, our businesses have become siloed, making it difficult to collaborate across business units.

Each time we integrate a new organization, we become even more fragmented. To further our mission to transform the way the world works, we also needed to transform how we work across all our businesses.

In 2017, we migrated our entire organization to Google Workspace. Built from the ground up as a cloud-first collaboration platform, Workspace was the perfect fit to unify our teams across organizations. Here’s how Google Workspace has powered our momentum, even in the face of economic uncertainty.

Unifying communication under one roof

In just two months, we moved over 9,000 employees to Google Workspace, accelerating productivity and connection throughout our distributed workforce in more than 40 countries. It’s now the one common platform that every employee — from the factory floor to the C-suite — uses for communication and collaboration, with 98% of Trimble’s companies operating on Google Workspace.

Our initial migration to Google Workspace was the single-most effective change management program that Trimble has ever done. With the understanding that change can often be a difficult, emotional process, we’ve taken a holistic change management approach to each of the companies we acquire. Many of these organizations have never used Google Workspace, so we have to slowly and steadily support their transformation.

To help people understand the value of Google Workspace, we’ve adapted our training strategy to focus less on individual applications and more on the interconnectedness of how the apps  work holistically together. Our “Communications Essentials” training dives into all the communication tools in the Workspace environment, such as Google Meet, Gmail, and Chat, to show how each piece interacts with the other. For example, employees can start a Meet directly in Chat with a single click, facilitating smooth, efficient collaboration. It’s about focusing on workflow and outcomes, instead of simply calling out features.

Powering hybrid collaboration through Google Meet

As a byproduct of our acquisition-driven strategy, we used to have countless contracts for every video conferencing platform imaginable, which was inefficient, costly, and didn’t fit with our future-facing values. Switching to Google Meet solved those challenges in a single, easy-to-use solution.

Google Meet now powers almost every meeting that takes place in a Trimble environment, amounting to approximately 170,000 Meet calls a month (or 1.5 million per year). In fact, our team now prefers Meet over in-person meetings. That’s because Meet just works. It syncs with Docs and Slides, offers machine learning-based light adjustment and noise removal, provides multiple options for screen sharing and companion mode for hybrid meetings, and more. We have hundreds of Meet hardware installations across our conference rooms, powering even further collaboration. Meet is integrated into everything we use, and it’s a standard part of our acquisition process.

Meet is so intuitive that we use it for company-wide conferences. For the past three years, Trimble has run a week-long virtual event where people across the company can host learning sessions for their colleagues. This year was our most successful event to date, with nearly 122 sessions and 4,000 attendees across 31 countries. The entire event was run on Google Meet.

With our evolving global workforce, we’re excited to leverage Meet’s innovative capabilities, such as real-time captioning, automatic translations, live streaming, and YouTube integration. These artificial intelligence features, the ability to access Workspace on any device, and the power to connect with large-scale live audiences across platforms will make collaboration with our international colleagues easier than ever before.

Building connected communities at scale

Our integration of Google Workspace into all the ways work happens at Trimble aligns with our guiding philosophy: connect and scale. We put users and customers at the center of everything we do. Whether businesses are using Trimble software to make buildings or the roads we drive on, or to power responsible farming and sustainability in the planet’s most essential industries, Google Workspace supports our most critical solutions.  It’s become essential to our business as we build a better future — together.