• Migrates more than 10000 users in just six months

• Boosts agility, speeding up rollout of new technologies with integrated authentication capabilities of Google Workspace

• Strengthens security with browser-based apps and centralized threat visibility on the Google Workspace Security Center

• Enables collaboration with low overhead, requiring just three employees to manage Google Workspace for 11,000+ people

Technology is a crucial enabler for this centralized management. When the company launched a digital transformation project back in 2015, finding a replacement for its legacy email and document management system was crucial.

"Our email solution was outdated, and the feedback from our users was that we needed to change," says Pöllmann. "The trend in our industry is toward smart home devices. We’re building a smart business to match."

Running IT systems at scale for a centralized international business is a major challenge. Viessmann’s IT infrastructure was routed through Allendorf, creating significant latency problems for users connecting from sites around the world. Poor connectivity for mobile working was another constraint on flexibility. Staff could only send or receive emails when directly connected to a company server, and could only connect with specific, compatible devices using clunky remote access solutions.

The challenge went far beyond email to file sharing and video conferencing, which is why Viessmann decided to connect its global workforce with Google Workspace.

Today, Google Workspace has simplified the daily work lives of most of Viessmann’s employees around the world. Apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Meet, make it much easier for Viessmann employees to stay in touch, and communicate across borders and time zones. By collaborating on Google Drive and Google Docs, Viessmann employees can now access the most up-to-date version of a file from anywhere, rather than multiple versions held on servers that were only accessible from the office.

For Pöllmann, all these efficiency gains are important, but the impact of the new ways of working go far beyond the sum of their parts. "Of course, our employees are constantly saving time with Google Workspace," he says. "But for us, the real benefit is strategic. We wanted to empower our employees by enabling them to work anywhere, anytime, from any device, securely. And that’s exactly what we’ve achieved."

This new way of working was put to the test by the COVID-19 pandemic. And while the pandemic took Viessmann’s employees by surprise, it had little to no impact on their ability to do their work."We created instructions for everyone, explaining the ins and outs of working remotely with their devices," says Pöllmann "And after two or three days, during which we saw more support tickets than usual, everything went back to normal. It really was quite simple for us."

Viessmann’s collaborative environment also extends to the company’s production facilities. This is where tomorrow’s sustainable energy solutions come to life. "We have different production lines for different products, but each uses the same Google Sites template with Docs and Sheets in the background," says Pöllmann. "It’s both an information panel and a place for people to enter data through a touch screen." By leveraging real-time information in dashboards, production teams can spot and deal with issues quickly, whether by rebalancing workloads or reallocating resources.

Pöllmann and his team now want to roll out even more Google Workspace solutions to the production teams, to make sure everyone’s included in the conversation, and aligned on shared goals and strategies. Creating sustainable living solutions for the future is a task that needs all hands on deck, and Pöllmann sees the collaboration and transparency Google Workspace offers, as a key enabler for that mission.

"Our biggest challenge, and opportunity, is the transition to more sustainable energy sources," says Pöllmann. "It’s a global project that impacts our manufacturing processes around the world, which would be impossible without real-time collaboration across borders and time zones. Google Workspace helps us to do just that."