The vision Montefiore developed together with Fronde, outlined the 'ideal' collaboration platform that supported the business' growth plans.
Customer
Montefiore Home has been an aged care provider for the Jewish community for over 120 years. As the largest aged care provider in the Sydney Eastern suburbs, Montefiore has four established residential care locations in Randwick, Hunters Hill, Woollahra and Camelot. Offering their ageing residents with a philosophy of 'lifestyle of care', Montefiore aspires to be the leading aged care provider in New South Wales
Background
With the increase in team members over the recent years and the additional sites and services created, combined with future growth plans, Montefiore faced the need to work smarter by enabling better collaboration between teams from the various locations. Additionally, aging hardware and their maintenance and accessibility, started to become a liability with major implications on large budgets locked up in CAPEX which are not available to drive innovation.
The in-house IT department advised the organisation that the traditional systems in place, Windows XP services and desktop computers, would not deliver on the demands of the business moving forward. In fact,teams already felt trapped by technology that did not allow for easy, fast, affordable and accessible collaboration.
Objectives
The vision Montefiore Home developed together with Fronde, outlined the 'ideal' collaboration platform that supported the business' growth plans: collaboration for Montefiore Home meant developing documents and plans together without having multiple document versions, accessing data easily, anytime and anywhere and managing projects and tasks across multiple business functions and sites. Communication including e-mail, shared calendars, chat functionality, videoconferencing and document storage also needed to be addressed.
Bruce Coller, CIO Montefiore Home said,
"Fronde has been a valuable partner and resource in Montefiore’s journey of implementing Google Chromebox for Meetings and Google Apps for Work."
Liberation Strategy
After analysing the overall business goals, collaboration roadblocks and needs of the business now and in the future, Fronde recommended moving to a cloud-based collaboration solution including Google Apps for Work,Google Chromebox and, later on, Google Chromebooks to replace desktop computers.
Google Apps for Work is a collaboration platform that includes cloud-based e-mail, calendar, document storage and collaboration as well as Google's video conferencing application, Hangout. These apps were made available to all staff to encourage cross-site and cross-business function collaboration.
Google Chromeboxes allow meetings with up to 15 participants, anywhere and on any device, from the conference room, at home or on the road. These were to be used in Montefioe Home's employee kiosks and meeting rooms to share screens wirelessly and collaborate on documents while meeting -without being held back by clunky dial-in codes and multiple steps to connect all participants.
Google Chromebooks run on Google's web-based Chrome OS, which is designed specifically for employees who do most of their work in the cloud. Being optimised for working in the cloud means they start fast, stay fast and are always up to date. Montefiore chose Chromebooks as the way forward to make devices more accessible, manageable and affordable. The move to Google Chromebooks has and will further liberate the organisation from constraints of IT - aging hardware that does not suit the business needs.
Don McLean, Country Manager at Fronde said,
“IT, and collaboration software solutions in particular, shouldn’t constrain your business -they should liberate it!”
Outcomes
Implementing the cloud-based collaboration solution consisting of Google Apps for Work, Google Chromeboxes and Google Chromebooks showed immediate improvements for Montefiore Homes. Teams felt liberated from the constraints of their current IT systems and processes.
The use of Google apps for Work saw productivity gains through the day-to-day operations of the organisation and improved efficiency and speed in the development of projects and tasks at hand. The readily available access to documents in the cloud,anywhere, anytime and on any device, meant that there was no longer the concern and friction of seeking the latest version. Overall team collaboration greatly improved between all four locations at Montefiore with real savings in time and associated cost. An increase in the quantity and quality of collaborative work was also observed.
Montefiore Homes has also made the flexibility of working from home more attractive for both the individual and the organisation. The organisation intends to continue working closely with Fronde as a partner to replace all their current Windows XP units with Google Chromebook and Google Chromebox products.
You can watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn9nyDa6ojk&feature=youtu.be
*These case studies are from our archives. Exact publish dates are not known.
