• Improves internal and external collaboration with live editing and secure document sharing on Google Drive

• Empowers employees across the world to work anytime, from anywhere, on any device

• Positions the IT department as a generator of innovation and strategic growth

Earlier this year, in the picturesque Germany town of Coburg, KAESER COMPRESSORS celebrated its hundredth anniversary. What started as a family-owned engineering workshop in Coburg in 1919, is today, still family-owned, one of the world’s leading providers of compressed air products and services with dozens of subsidiaries and customers in more than a hundred countries. Compressed air is an essential component of modern industry, so much so that it has been referred to as the "fourth utility" for manufacturers.

"We have been doing this for a long time," says Christian Schiffner, Systems Manager at KAESER COMPRESSORS. "We’ve set ourselves apart by trying to be visionaries. We work in a very traditional sector, but we’ve made a point of using the latest technology to design and manufacture the best products we can."

In 2018, KAESER COMPRESSORS’ existing email and productivity platform was starting to show its age and was in need of an overhaul. The email solution was managed with on-premises servers which were nearing capacity as the flow of emails and communications increased every day. As well as the constant need to add more storage, the IT department also had to archive emails and keep them searchable, which was proving to be a hassle.

At the same time, the company’s employees weren’t working in the most efficient ways together. Collaboration was ad hoc and based on sharing and updating documents over long email threads. Files could get lost or replaced with the wrong version. KAESER COMPRESSORS’ workers operate all over the world and are often on the move, but their mobile devices only really allowed them access to email and calendar. If they wanted to do in-depth work on documents or spreadsheets, they had to do so at their desktop computers, which limited their flexibility.

It was time for KAESER COMPRESSORS to upgrade to a more modern, cloud-based platform. Rather than automatically renew the existing contract, CIO Falko Lameter chose to take a more considered approach. "Make more compressed air with less energy" had been the company’s motto for decades, a core driver of the desire to work with the latest and best technologies. It was clear that a cloud-based IT infrastructure was a good way of achieving this goal, and a new email and productivity platform would provide the company with a solid foundation on which to build. Strategically, it was important to choose the right one, and after closely evaluating its options, KAESER COMPRESSORS chose Google Workspace. "We chose Google Workspace because it’s cloud-native, and as such had the most mature feature set compared with the other products we were looking at," says Christian. "It was simply the best product for us."

In the summer of 2018, KAESER COMPRESSORS teamed up with Google Cloud Premier Partner Wabion to help plan and bring about the switch to Google Workspace. "We spent a lot of time discussing and working with KAESER COMPRESSORS to really understand what their needs were and how we could achieve them," says Michael Walther, Managing Director at Wabion. "From the beginning it was a very close relationship."

Wabion and KAESER COMPRESSORS wanted the transition to be as smooth and painless as possible and spent months planning the technical aspects of the migration. At the same time, both were in full agreement that they needed a comprehensive plan of change management and training to prepare the workforce for the new platform. Rather than traditional classroom training, Wabion and KAESER COMPRESSORS chose to use more organic change management techniques. First, they produced a series of short videos showing specific tools and techniques within Google Workspace, such as sharing a calendar item with a colleague. They also identified people across the company to be early adopters of Google Workspace, who could spread their knowledge around as they worked.

With Google Workspace, KAESER COMPRESSORS has found a way to build a new way of working and re-orient the company around cloud technology. One of the most remarkable aspects of the transition is how quickly and seamlessly it has happened. All the planning and change management proved invaluable as the company migrated 5,500 users, more than 6 million calendar and contacts objects, and 14 terabytes of emails in a single weekend.