Samudera Indonesia consolidated multiple email platforms onto Google Workspace, reducing email costs and enabling mobile access to productivity applications.
Samudera Indonesia is an integrated cargo transportation and logistics company. The company has six business lines including shipping, logistics, ports, shipyards, property, and services. Samudera Indonesia has approximately 100 subsidiaries and 6,000 employees in offices across Indonesia and Asia.
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Indonesia
Samudera Indonesia consolidated multiple email platforms onto Google Workspace, reducing email costs and enabling mobile access to productivity applications.
Google Workspace Results
Reduces email costs by 26%
• Increases employee collaboration to enhance work quality and decision making
• Enhances productivity by extending access to email, document, and other productivity tools on mobile devices
• Consolidates several unintegrated email and collaboration systems onto a single platform
• Increases email storage without requiring any additional investment
is an integrated cargo transportation and logistics company established in 1964. The company started in the early 1950s as an international shipping agency. Samudera Indonesia employs about 6,000 people across six business lines, including shipping, logistics, ports, shipyards, property, and services.
“Our key reasons for going with Google Workspace included the superior features and functionality of its applications, its closer alignment with the culture and processes of the business, and cost.” - Andri Wisnu Gunawan, Staff of Managing Director for IT Development, Samudera Indonesia
With a vision of connecting the nation, Samudera Indonesia actively expanded into new markets and business segments. The company’s strategy has encompassed organic growth, joint ventures, and acquisitions. However, as Samudera Indonesia grew, email products and platforms proliferated across the business, with IT teams devoting ever-increasing amounts of time administering email systems and associated infrastructure. The workloads continued to expand due to incidents that compromised performance and availability. Furthermore, its email systems only had limited storage due to the investment required to add capacity, increasing the risk of employees not receiving important emails in a timely fashion, or at all.
This could delay responses to important queries and impeded Samudera Indonesia’s adoption of modern, flexible working practices.
Acquisition sparks change
Last year the acquisition of another company was the catalyst that prompted the IT team to find better ways to integrate its workforce and systems with those of Samudera Indonesia. The business decided to consolidate its various email systems onto one and provide workforce applications that could spark productivity and innovation. Samudera Indonesia quickly determined that cloud-based applications could minimize the infrastructure management load on its IT team, enable the business to control costs, and enable the seamless integration of new employees.
Samudera Indonesia conducted a comprehensive review of cloud-based applications. The organization quickly determined best met its needs. "Our key reasons for going with Google Workspace included superior application features and functionality, close alignment with the culture and processes of our business, and cost," explains Andri Wisnu Gunawan, Staff of Managing Director for IT Development at Samudera Indonesia.
“The simplicity of the system makes it easy to implement and for our employees to use. It only took us 2.5 months to deploy to 3,100 users across 27 cities in Indonesia and 6 countries in the Asia Pacific.” - Andri Wisnu Gunawan, Staff of Managing Director for IT Development, Samudera Indonesia
The company decided to migrate 3,100 of its employees’ email accounts to Google Workspace and completed the project in only a few months. With assistance from Google account and technical teams and partner PT PointStar, Samudera Indonesia completed the project on time and within budget. "We created and distributed a considerable amount of information to assist with the migration," explains Gunawan.
The team also conducted extensive user acceptance exercises. These included selecting 400 employees for intensive training to act as leaders and advocates for the wider adoption of Google Workspace across the business.
"The simplicity of the system makes it easy to implement and for our employees to use," Gunawan says. "It only took us 2.5 months to deploy to 3,100 users across 27 cities in Indonesia and 6 countries in the Asia Pacific."
Mobile access delivered
Consolidation to Gmail was the cornerstone of the Google Workspace project. All 3,100 employees are now using an intuitive email system that incorporates features such as customizable tabs that allow them to quickly see what is new and choose what emails to read and when. They can easily sync and access emails from smartphones and tablets as well as PCs and notebooks, enabling them to respond quickly to messages when on the road.
“Drive provides a single, easily accessible location for important files. Team members now know immediately where they are rather than potentially having to check multiple systems or locations to find them.” - Andri Wisnu Gunawan, Staff of Managing Director for IT Development, Samudera Indonesia
Employees can also use to schedule appointments — including to meet with up to 15 internal or external parties using voice only or video or a combination of both — directly from devices. They can also use Google Workspace apps to edit slides, spreadsheets, or documents from different locations. All changes can be incorporated into a single , , or in real time. This eliminates the need for employees to circulate multiple versions for input and approval, a time-consuming process susceptible to version control issues.
Migrated to a single domain
As well as helping to transform Samudera Indonesia into a modern workplace, Google Workspace has enabled the business to adopt a more unified environment for collaboration. This has helped minimize confusion for companies wanting to do business with Samudera Indonesia, helped optimize search engine performance, and reduced the time and resources the business dedicated to managing multiple domains.
The enterprise-grade storage capacity, enhanced security, and availability of has convinced several directors to move all their business files to the service. "Drive provides a single, easily accessible location for important files," explains Gunawan. "Team members now know immediately where they are rather than potentially having to check multiple systems or locations to find them." Furthermore, our business unit directors can be confident files are well protected from external threats.
Reducing system and infrastructure costs
Deploying Google Workspace has enabled Samudera Indonesia to reduce its email system and infrastructure costs by 26 percent. "With Google Workspace, we’ve been able to consolidate multiple email platforms supporting 3,100 employees onto a single email platform," explains Gunawan. The company has not experienced any incidents or outages since moving to Google Workspace, minimizing disruption and building employees’ confidence that the product can meet their needs.
This confidence has extended to growing support for Samudera Indonesia’s IT team. The IT department is now viewed as a key business enabler rather than a gatekeeper or a function dedicated to simply supporting basic activities.
With Google Workspace successfully deployed, Samudera Indonesia’s IT team is now exploring the opportunities products such as and can deliver to the business.
"Google Workspace has enabled us to bring our business into a new era and seamlessly absorb any new acquisitions or support new ventures," Gunawan says. "We’re extremely pleased with the benefits the product is delivering."