Smart working: did your company react smartly?
Staying at home is no longer just a civic gesture, but a collective necessity: how did your Company react? Was Smart Working simple and painless, or did it cause panic and problems?
At Open Gate we have been working in Smart Working mode for more than 3 weeks... all of us... having made the decision one evening for the following morning... with no problems or interruptions to our operations.
Can your company say the same?
If the answer is no, this is the time to reflect and invest in a company able to overcome the barriers of an office, to become a company ready to face critical situations quickly and smartly.
To help you, we will tell you how we work and how many of our Clients work.
CLOUD SERVERS
Every piece of our software, front end, test environment... resides exclusively in the cloud.
This choice in itself makes us independent of a physical site that would need maintenance, support, the presence of technicians, security measures...
All of our Clients who have already chosen to migrate their applications to the cloud have also been able to face this complex situation with one less thing to worry about and the certainty that we would guarantee continuity in supporting their machines.
OUR ERP ALWAYS WITH US
Our in-house ERP (custom and, of course, developed by us!) is also untied from any physical location.
All of us Open Gate employees have credentials to access our management system, a Web Application that can be used from any PC with connectivity.
So we never stopped having access to the company calendar, where we organise meetings, track the activities carried out for a Client...
We kept creating new Projects for our Clients and managing the projects already in progress.
We carried on with our sales activity, thanks to our CRM, and we never stopped issuing Invoices... exactly as if we were in the office.
COMMUNICATING IS ESSENTIAL
It is hard to work at full operational capacity without communicating with other people: whether they are colleagues or clients, it is essential to have efficient ways to talk.
We use Hangouts Chat, even in non-emergency conditions, to communicate quickly between colleagues. Privately, with a single colleague, or in work groups.
Hangouts allows us not only to chat but also to send images and make video calls.
Web meetings between colleagues have a double advantage: looking each other in the face while talking lets you pick up on doubts, hesitations, satisfaction... that would otherwise be lost in a written text and, secondly, it lets you share your screen, to show a procedure or an image you want to explain to a colleague.
If we need to communicate with a Client we use Hangouts Meet: just create an appointment on Google Calendar and a dedicated Meet room will automatically be associated with it.
The link to join the meeting is available directly in the calendar event, included in the email that reminds participants of the time and date of the appointment.
Of course we use our company email, which is not "downloaded" onto a PC that might not be with us: it is a mailbox reachable from a browser, simply by entering our login credentials.
ALL THE DOCUMENTS YOU MAY NEED
If all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations... you were working on yesterday reside on a PC located in your office... today you will hardly manage to organise your work anywhere other than your office.
You will have to make copies of everything, retrieve documents piled up on your desk... maybe you will have to arrange to install software on your home PC... and move onto that PC everything you had on your work one...
Imagine instead having absolutely nothing on your PC... not even a single file!
Imagine being able to work on documents residing in a cloud storage space. Think of being able to share those documents, work on them with 4, 6, 8... hands simultaneously, seeing in real time what the other person is writing.
That is exactly how we work. Not in emergency situations, always!
We use Google Drive, where we have individual folders or folders shared by work groups, where we create presentations, docs, spreadsheets...
We can share these documents simply by enabling a colleague or a client to view the document, or export everything to PDF and send it by email.
We can create templates, which we can reuse n times or which our colleagues can use, to make a quote, a specification document, a presentation...
Do you think having everything I have just described is expensive and complex? It is not at all... just switch to GSuite, to have Mail, Drive, Hangouts, Meet... just scrap your servers and move to a cloud server on Google Cloud Platform or Amazon Web Services.
How long does it take? Less than you can imagine...
If you are not Smart yet... this is the perfect time to become so: contact us at sales@opengate.biz and we will accompany you along the whole journey.
