• Cuts the invoice approval process down to hours instead of 6 weeks or more

• Enhances email reliability with zero downtime in 3 years, instead of every 10 days

• Coordinates 70 vehicles and 2 planes with Google Calendar and Google Meet

“There are a lot of moving parts in our business,” explains Dominic Grammaticas, managing director of Governors’ Camp. “We have around 500 employees across the region and 70 vehicles serving up to 200 guests at any one time.” At the same time, mobile internet is revolutionizing life in the region. “Kenya and Rwanda have been very quick to adopt new technology and leapfrog the old fixed-line connections,” says Dominic. “Everyone uses cell phones, 3G is strong across the area, and we have 4G in more than 60% of the country. A lot of people operate off-grid on solar power. We're used to working in unusual ways.”

Until recently, Governors’ Camp used paper for everything from vehicle rotas to invoicing, alongside an unreliable, on-premises email system. Dominic and his team recognized the potential of Google Workspace to deliver a more stable, central platform for all communications.

“We want our clients to be really well looked after,” says Dominic. “They have high expectations, so we can have no slip ups. By removing bottlenecks, increasing efficiency, and accelerating our ability to collaborate, Google Workspace helps us get things done in a highly mobile work environment.”

Highly mobile teams often find collaborating over distance to be inefficient and frustrating, if not impossible. For Governors’ Camp, running multiple, simultaneous safaris in the Kenyan and Rwandan wilderness turned core operations, such as invoicing and resource allocation, into daily challenges. By 2015, it was clear that even the existing email solution based on on-premises servers was no longer fit for the purpose. “I found that the only way I could synchronize my devices was to forward everything to a personal Gmail account,” says Dominic. “It worked, but it was very ad hoc.” That’s when Dominic began speaking to John Schmidt at BusinessCom Solutions Africa about a more formal solution, implementing Google Workspace across the company.

“BusinessCom set us up with Google Workspace, and their expertise and availability have been amazing,” says Dominic. “When you implement something new you expect disruption and problems, and that simply did not happen. In fact, we had the exact opposite. People immediately understood our decision to turn off the old solution one day and switch directly to Google Workspace. When people in remote locations collaborate on Google Sheets, for example, and see data appear in front of them, they’re immediately converted. We suddenly went from organized chaos to being on top of things. Usage grew organically to embrace the entire suite, as well as specialized third-party apps, such as ProsperWorks.”

Handling documents has long been a problem for Governors’ Camp, to the extent that in the past, three people were tasked solely with locating documents within piles of old papers. That reliance on paper was a major problem for invoicing, as Dominic explains: “For 43 years we collected credit invoices in a Nairobi warehouse, put them in a mailbag in a truck, and hoped that they made it to the Mara without getting wet or worse. Then the invoices would be distributed to 4 different properties and 10 different departments to be signed and approved, before being returned to Nairobi in a mailbag again. The entire process could take four to six weeks, sometimes longer.”

Thanks to BusinessCom Solutions Africa, Governors’ Camp now approves invoices through a system of folders on Google Drive set up with specific access permissions. When an invoice requires approval, it is uploaded to Drive, then moved from one folder to the next by the designated people. Since each of those people can only take part using his or her Google Workspace login and password, if a document has moved through a confidential set of Google Drive folders, it must have been approved by the relevant people. So Governors’ Camp can book invoices on time, keep accounts up to date, and help ensure creditor ledgers are transparent.

In addition to approving invoices, the team is better equipped to send them, as Dominic explains: “I have completely cut back on bad debts with Drive. In the past, when someone claimed not to have received an invoice from us, we would have to dig it out and send it to them again. Now I can find any invoice in a matter of seconds while on the phone chasing a customer for payment. That cuts out delays and improves efficiency, meaning more cash flow, less stress, and more investment.”