General Mobile: Making the call to improve collaboration
Leading Turkish smartphone manufacturer General Mobile unified and simplified its complex communications legacy with Google Workspace tools for everything from archiving to taking minutes.
General Mobile is a smartphone brand founded in 2005. Today, it is Turkey's largest Android manufacturer, cooperating with some of the world's major brands, such as Google, Foxconn, Qualcomm, Corning, Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, and Wacom.
Leading Turkish smartphone manufacturer General Mobile unified and simplified its complex communications legacy with Google Workspace tools for everything from archiving to taking minutes.
Google Workspace Results
User IT issues down by 20%
• Gives the legal team oversight on unauthorized document deletion with Google Vault
• Eliminates the need for VPNs for a more mobile company culture, thanks to Drive
• Saves over 5 hours a week for members of the IT team by minimizing maintenance
“We produce, develop, and distribute our devices by ourselves, from our own factory. To make that more effective, we decided that everything we do, from beginning to end, should operate using Google Workspace.” - Fatih Sahin, System & Network Manager, General Mobile
General Mobile is a leading smartphone manufacturer in Turkey, where it is one of the top three choices for mobile devices. Because it's also one of the most popular brands in countries including the Netherlands, Croatia, and Azerbaijan, General Mobile is growing fast, and is now exporting to more than 30 markets worldwide.
Behind that success, a team of more than 900 General Mobile employees work at the company's headquarters in Istanbul or at its factory nearby, coordinating with a sales team of 60 people dispersed around the country. Communication is vital to that collaboration, which is why the company moved from its cumbersome legacy communications tools to a cloud-based, mobile, low-maintenance Google Workspace solution.
"We produce, develop, and distribute our devices by ourselves, from our own factory," says Mehmet Fatih Sahin, System & Network Manager at General Mobile. "To make that more effective, we decided that everything we do, from beginning to end, should operate using Google Workspace."
Simplifying and unifying communications for all
“As a smartphone company, we use smartphones even more than computers. Google Workspace is ideal for that mobility, because it's based in the cloud. Now we can collaborate from anywhere, on any device, without VPNs.” - Fatih Sahin, System & Network Manager, General Mobile
Over time, many companies accumulate a complicated array of legacy communications solutions – and the burden of maintaining those systems. General Mobile used a number of different on-premises email and file server solutions, together with third-party applications for additional services, such as video conferencing. For employees, that complexity made collaboration more difficult, and mobility was hampered by cumbersome VPN connections to on-premises systems. For Fatih and his team, managing that array was a major challenge.
"We had to allocate storage on servers to individual users, and set limits," says Fatih. "The archive system was a particular problem. We did not have a way to oversee accounts that prevented users who were leaving the company from deleting files. That became a serious legal concern for the company."
To avoid these issues and to create a more efficient work environment for employees and the IT team, General Mobile switched to Google Workspace. "As a smartphone company, we use smartphones even more than computers," says Fatih. "Google Workspace is ideal for that mobility, because it's based in the cloud. Now we can collaborate from anywhere, on any device, without VPNs."
Instead of a complicated range of different products, Google Workspace delivers messaging, video conferencing, file storage, document creation, spreadsheets, and more through a single solution, without on-premises servers to maintain. "Other solutions that we tested appear to be unified, but they actually have many different sub-applications," says Fatih. "Google Workspace isn't like that. We can manage users through one platform, which is much more efficient. And because we chose Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, we no longer have limits on storage space for each user."
“Now that we use Google Vault for archiving, if someone changes or deletes a document, we know about it and can retain a copy. That's made things a lot easier for our legal team.” - Fatih Sahin, System & Network Manager, General Mobile
Google Workspace collaboration tools have made collaboration quicker and easier, in part because now everyone is using the same product. "We've started to use Keep for keeping minutes in meetings," says Eyüp Kaya, Project Hardware Manager in the General Mobile Research and Development department. "Before, we would need to email minutes to people or even use other third-party applications, which could be a problem if not everyone had the same third-party apps. Now we can share minutes with all participants."
Vault has been especially valuable for the company, as Fatih explains: "Now that we use Google Vault for archiving, if someone changes or deletes a document, we know about it and can retain a copy. That's made things a lot easier for our legal team."
Migrating the whole workforce with Global IT
General Mobile works with Google to produce Android smartphones, and when the company decided to switch to Google Workspace, it needed a partner to help make the migration happen. Global IT was an excellent fit. Together, the teams selected which systems to migrate, and how and when to do it.
The IT team became the first adopters, and delegated two members of the team to be experts on each Google Workspace application, ready to handle questions from users during the wider rollout. Rather than be confined to sections of the company or individual functions, General Mobile looked to enable collaboration across all parts of the organization using the new tools.
"One of the principles of our company is that we work together on mobile," says Eyüp. "In the R&D department, we upload all of our documents to Drive because we want to share them with people from our factory floor to distributors. All participants in what we do need to have access."
More usable tools and a minimal maintenance burden
In the three months since completing the migration to Google Workspace, the IT team has recorded a 20 percent decrease in the number of IT issues reported by users every month. And thanks to the reduced maintenance burden, each member of the IT team now has five to six more hours every week to work on training and business development. Now the team are working with individual departments, such as the sales staff, to see how the new tools can help make life easier for them.
"Every time we changed our software in the past, we experienced resistance from users," says Fatih. "But that has not happened with Google Workspace. Now we're looking at generating automatic reports, and considering a next step with Google Cloud Platform."
