Taylor Woodrow saves £1 million with Google Apps

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Taylor Woodrow, the construction, facilities management and engineering services subsidiary of Taylor Wimpey, has transferred all of its 1,800 employees onto Google Apps Premier Edition, saving £1 million in costs and software licence fees.

The firm will now use the free suite of hosted email, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and calendaring applications, as well as collaboration tools Google Sites and Google Talk at offices across its operations, paying fees to Google for its Premier support package.

Rob Ramsay, Taylor Woodrow director of IT said: “Many of our staff are highly mobile, with around 200 mobile technicians who spend most of their working day at construction sites and client premises. The ability to provide them with access on the move to email, documents, spreadsheets and everything else that comes with Google Apps is something that will help increase productivity.”

The firm has been using the Google Search Appliance to manage search and retrieval of documents on its intranet for over two years now and made the decision to move to search giant’s entire productivity platform after trialling a Google Site to host online training documentation and videos for employees to familiarise themselves with Google Apps. It said over 1,000 users volunteered to sign up to trial the service prior to the go-live date.

“Our employees can now get in touch with their colleagues easily from whatever location they are working at,” said Ramsay. He added it was the mobility Google offers, coupled with the speed of roll-out, the lack of requirement for a physical infrastructure and the pace of new product development that were seen as main the benefits of adoption.

“It also gives our employees access to a system and interface that many of them are already familiar with as a result of their use of Google products at home,” he said.

Taylor Woodrow has also deployed Google Message Discovery for email security, content policy management, discovery and archiving services to ensure that employee email is protected and retained, for business continuity and compliance requirements.

“Ensuring that all our emails are protected from threats and stored correctly is something that is important to our business operations,” added Ramsay.

The £1-million savings have been calculated on the basis that the productivity suite is hosted, saving on infrastructure-related overheads and because it’s subscription-based support costs are inclusive and predictable.

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