Drives innovation and employee collaboration at Waitrose with Google for Work

Consumers adopt new technologies that rapidly allow access to information, greater choice and convenience, Waitrose needed an innovative approach to the way they were collaborating with their customers and internally with their employees. Waitrose chose to roll out Google Apps for Work across 340 stores for 65,000 employees to improve communications across the business and truly innovate the way their employees work and interact with their customers. Google Apps for Work stood out as the obvious choice, providing employees with a well-established platform to collaborate with each other and build on Waitrose's philosophy of sharing profit, power and knowledge.

"There's a huge amount of change in retailing, brought about by evolving customer shopping patterns. Customers are reaching out more, shopping more frequently, buying less and embracing new technology," said Cheryl Millington, IT Director at Waitrose. "This has meant we've had to think about our business differently. We wanted a modern technology that would fit with our brand and our style of working with our customer and our employees. Modern Waitrose is all about changing the traditional supermarket business into a business that's ripe for a different, modern time."

The project, led by Cloud Sherpas, has seen greater collaboration and knowledge-sharing in real time between staff. Sharing files quickly and easily through Google+ and Google Drive -- including Docs, Sheets and Slides has meant significant time savings for Waitrose. Typically, it would take hours or even weeks to plan rotas and workforce management which can now be coordinated within minutes. The improvement of internal collaboration, staff have not only been able to spend more time on the shop floor, but also more easily share new ideas across stores, directly improving the customer experience.

"Moving to Google Apps was key to modernising the business and improving collaboration among employees," said Ciaran Cosgrave, Cloud Sherpas vice president in EMEA. "Providing users with the same working experience, anywhere and from any device means best practices and knowledge can be shared instantaneously with thousands of people."

The deployment of Google Apps was a cultural change for the organisation, as well as a technological one. Waitrose looked for an experienced partner to advise on best practices prior to the migration, support the actual implementation and ensure the cultural transition was seamless and adoption rates high among users. Cloud Sherpas was selected based on its extensive experience in deploying Google Apps for Work. A four-time Google Enterprise Partner of the Year for Google Apps, Cloud Sherpas tailored the roll out to Waitrose's specific requirements, working with individual teams throughout the process and ensuring that everyone was involved every step of the way.

"When you replace your email and calendar system, it's quite high risk because it touches everyone in the business, so I was quite nervous about making the transition. It was really important to us that this was a smooth transition," commented Millington. "Cloud Sherpas' knowledge, patience and ability to roll out the technology in a way that was engaging for our business teams really made a difference."