In 1908, my great grandfather Benedetto Noberasco set up his fruit and vegetable business in Albenga, Italy. More than 100 years later, Noberasco SpA has grown to become the market leader in Italy’s dried fruit and nuts sector. As a fourth generation CEO, I am constantly looking for innovative ways of adapting the business to meet the changing demands of the market and stay at the top of our game. The most important focus for our business today is speed. Time to market is everything and, with several links in our production chain, we are always working to optimize our processes.

Google Workspace was central to our drive for greater efficiency after we consolidated our two main centers into one purpose-built headquarters in Carcare. Integrating our two divisions provided an opportunity to overhaul our collaborative process by implementing Google Workspace. Before then, collaboration was very difficult. Our staff would waste valuable time emailing attachments or downloading 100 megabyte files from separate servers just to see basic data.

We had already worked with change-management specialists Innext when we moved to the new headquarters. As one of Italy’s leading Google Partners, Innext was the ideal company to help transition our office to Google Workspace. The migration went very smoothly and in less than a month we were up and running. Innext trained our staff to a high level of competency and continue to work with us as we expand our workforce even further.

Our employees took to Google Workspace incredibly quickly. In a few months, the vast majority of our staff were engaging with its Apps. Today, around 90 percent of the team have adopted Google Workspace into their regular routines and over 75 percent chat in Google Meet, minimizing the time they spend on emails or travelling to meetings. With less need for maintenance, our IT costs have been lowered as well, and IT staff have time to develop new processes such as optimizing our analytics with Data Studio.

Last year, we launched 70 new products. We’ve always been able to identify opportunities, but Google Workspace helps us capitalize on them as never before by making sure our team has the right information at the right time. For us, Google Workspace is not an IT project. It’s an evolution of our organization and a whole new way for our employees to collaborate. It’s the kind of innovation that Noberasco needs to keep growing for another hundred years.