• Improves communication with minimal interruption even in low connectivity areas, and faster email searches

• Supports productive employee collaboration and resource sharing with Google Calendar and Google Drive

• Offers centralized administration capabilities for multiple services, enabling the IT support team to work more efficiently

• Helps remote working with personalized virtual desktops delivered by Google Chrome Navigator and OS

Do you know where the water in your tap comes from? Drinking water and sanitation are essential resources, and they require significant management and maintenance. In the Vienne administrative region (known as a “department”) in western France, a public sector partnership is responsible for the task of keeping water resources safe for private and public usage. Eaux de Vienne-Siveers looks after 80% of the department’s population, delivering drinking water to around 330,000 inhabitants and maintaining 9,400 km of pipes.

Eaux de Vienne divides the department into 10 territories, each with its own operations center, with the headquarters located in the departmental capital of Poitiers. “Each territory has one or several elected representatives and a local committee,” explains Vincent Murat, CIO at Eaux de Vienne. “This enables us to stay close to the towns we represent and react to local needs.” By sharing resources across its territories, the company is able to provide the best possible service, carrying out its duties of distributing drinking water, providing wastewater sanitation, and maintaining infrastructure.

When you’re working remotely, it can be difficult to stay connected, especially with an unreliable internet network. “We were using a web-based email provider, but we found ourselves having to install email clients on machines to compensate for patchy server connections, which required additional administration,” says Vincent. Connecting with the office while working in the field was difficult, and for the administrative team, simple tasks took a long time. “Performing a search for an email could take 40 seconds, which really added up over a working week,” Vincent adds. Eaux de Vienne wanted a messaging solution that would not only work within the bandwidth available, but also provide enhanced collaboration capabilities.

Following a public tender process, it chose Google Workspace due to the breadth of tools it offers within one single platform. “We carried out some tests and were reassured that it would work within the bandwidth available,” says Vincent. “Functions such as being able to edit Docs and Sheets in offline mode also help to make distance working more effective.”

To make sure all its employees were on board with the change, Eaux de Vienne involved them in the process early on. “We invited a panel of users, including directors, administratives, and technicians, to be present at the tender presentations,” says Vincent. “There was a real ‘wow’ factor when they saw everything they could do with Google Workspace. They could see the potential for a big improvement in terms of performance and efficiency.” Members of this group then went on to become early adopters in the first phase of the rollout, receiving training to help them make the most of the tools.

In order to meet the needs of all users, implementation partner GoWizYou provided two different levels of training to accommodate employees’ varied needs and prior knowledge. “Our focus, as always, is on training and passing on our expertise,” says Patrick Le Roux, CEO and co-founder at GoWizYou. “We migrated over employees’ emails before the training so they could work with their own data, such as email, calendar, contacts, and documents, during the live training sessions,” he shares. “Employees have different levels of skill when it comes to using IT tools, and the initial training was one of the keys to helping them. Another key is long-term support, which we believe will enable them to really take advantage of Google Workspace tools.”

On top of solving Eaux de Vienne’s email challenges, Google Workspace has transformed the way its employees collaborate. To arrange meetings, employees now send Calendar invites instead of picking up the phone and use Docs to define the agenda for participants. They also use Forms to make team decisions on resources such as meeting rooms. “We used Forms to create a survey so employees could be involved in choosing names for the rooms, each named after a river in the region,” says Vincent.

A group of 50 employees responsible for contributing to specific administrative projects has also been given access to shared Drives, which has enabled them to work in completely new ways. “We now use Docs and shared Drives to work on our administrative act documents, which detail the minutes of meetings and decisions taken,” says Vincent. “Each stage of the process is controlled by providing appropriate Drive and Docs access to the administrative staff and members of the management team who are involved.” Vincent estimates that this optimized process speeds up the editing process by around a week for each act, while making it more legally secure.