• Enables quick and easy file sharing between factory, office, logistics, and retail locations across continents

• Empowers teams to collaborate with intuitive and accessible Calendar functions

• Reduces email backlogs by encouraging employees to communicate more directly

Chantelle Lingerie is a world leader in the design and retail of women’s lingerie, with factories and boutiques in 20 countries. Founded in 1876, the company is responsible for every stage of its products’ journey to the customer, from conception and design to production, distribution, and retail. With factories in Morocco and Tunisia as well as Thailand, Vietnam, and Hungary, the company oversees a global operation involving 6,000 members of staff, of which approximately 2,000 have a computer account.

Being involved with every aspect of its products means Chantelle Lingerie has complete control over its quality and delivery, but it also has to manage many different teams along the supply chain. Encouraging these different teams to collaborate and work together is essential to remaining competitive. The company’s previous IT infrastructure was not equipped to provide employees with the tools they needed to communicate effectively.

To improve its internal communications, Chantelle Lingerie looked for a solution that would empower its employees to collaborate in real time across devices and instantly update information in documents shared between teams. Google Workspace proved to be the perfect fit.

“We want to encourage collaboration within the company and get people moving outside of their divisions, as the business is organized more or less by departments,” says Fabrice Chevron, Digital Workplace and Change Manager at Chantelle Lingerie. “From an IT perspective, the objective is to collaborate better and communicate more spontaneously, between departments and teams.”

Global production and distribution requires excellent communication in terms of messaging, planning, and sharing information. With factories across several continents, Chantelle Lingerie’s employees often need to share documents quickly but its previous infrastructure couldn’t support their needs. As a result, employees were relying on services outside the official IT system leading to confusion and backlogs of IT queries. In 2015, Chantelle Lingerie decided to look for a solution that would enable employees to share documents and calendars efficiently with minimal IT support.

To do that, the company switched to Google Workspace. Now, with Google Drive, employees can create and share files without any need for help from IT technicians. Using Sheets and Docs, when new information is entered into a Sheet or Doc, the file immediately updates and miscommunications over duplicated documents are no longer a problem. “Previously, files would be sent via email and would never be up to date, with duplicates that would need to be merged and so on,” explains Fabrice. “Now, collaboration between subsidiaries and HQ takes place using Google Drive and it is much easier to work together. Multiple subsidiaries can work on a single document or see what is happening comparatively, as it is easier to view two documents side-by-side.”

With Google Meet, employees are able to communicate efficiently in real time, reducing the need for time-consuming email exchanges, and Calendar means they can easily arrange meetings and Meet. “Previously, we had a calendar but very few people used it because the interface was not very practical and the functionality was inadequate,” says Fabrice. “Now, it’s very straightforward to share our Calendar and we can all be accessible to one another. That’s really important progress.”

Finally, with Google Workspace, employees can access their accounts from wherever they are in the world, on any device. “Everyone can use their emails, calendar, and Drive documents wherever they might be,” says Fabrice. “Before, we didn’t have anything that could be used so easily across different devices, including laptops, smartphones, and tablets. You can access all the Google Workspace resources with just a basic smartphone.”

The challenge of onboarding Chantelle Lingerie’s employees across multiple locations and continents was taken on by its implementation partner, cloud services specialist Cirruseo. To help ensure a smooth and successful transition over to Google Workspace, Cirruseo implemented a detailed communication plan ahead of the migration that included identifying “Google Ambassadors” for each location, offering training and support before and after the migration, and a dedicated intranet site. “Another advantage of Google as a solution is that it is widely known by the general public,” says Fabrice. “We therefore had a significant proportion of employees who already used Google products for their own private accounts. This also facilitated the changeover.”

Once the communication plan was in place, user accounts were migrated ten or twenty at a time. “Using Google’s data migration services, we were able to automate a large part of what usually has to be done manually,” explains Barthélemy Delerm, Digital Workplace Director at Cirruseo. “Solving that issue meant that we were able to stick to the planned schedule.”