Agricultural supplies company increases productivity and makes savings with Google Cloud
AVEVE Group is the Belgian market leader in the agricultural supplies sector, employing over 1,800 people across more than 50 businesses and operating Belgium’s largest garden center chain, comprising over 230 stores.
AVEVE sought to bring its group together under one centralised, standardised environment, with IT Service Delivery Manager Bart Gouweloose saying: “In the past, every branch and location would do its own thing. It was very silo based, with little communication between different parties.”
“Now we’re pooling resources to do more with the same number of people. For example, rather than every company doing its own bookkeeping, we are moving to a shared service center to do the finances for the whole group. That demands a lot more communication between companies and means that having a good platform for collaboration is crucial for the future of the group.”
In order to implement a unified communications platform across its constituent companies, AVEVE Group introduced G Suite, attracted by its fixed price and savings potential. Overall, the company calculated that it could save €2 million per year through improved productivity with collaboration.
Working with implementation partner Fourcast, AVEVE migrated 220 of its stores within two months, before expanding this to the entire group. Once this was done, the group’s entire file stack, as well as its Sharepoint environment, was available to all AVEVE staff, enabling more efficient connection and collaboration.
Gouweloose says: “AODocs made it possible to migrate Sharepoint environments simply with all of their metadata and workflows. That made it easy to migrate away from legacy systems and platforms, and the combination of Google Drive and AODocs has helped us to deliver the productivity solutions that are making such a difference to our approach to work.”
According to Gouweloose, staff began to see the advantages of G Suite within six months, with productivity gaining 8 per cent across the group and over 90 per cent of the group’s employees based solely on G Suite by the end of 2018.
