MS Autotech drives decision-making and communications with Google Apps

Posted by Lee Tae Kyu, CEO of MS Autotech

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Lee Tae Kyu, CEO of MS Autotech, which specializes in car-body parts for auto manufacturers such as Hyundai Motor Co., Kia Motors and Daimler-Benz. In 2011, the company had revenues of approximately 500 billion KRW, and anticipates revenues in 2012 of between 600 and 700 billion KRW. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

My company, MS Autotech is based in Korea, but the auto-makers we supply with parts include not only Korean manufacturers such as Hyundai and Kia, but also non-Korean companies such as Daimler-Benz. We have 900 employees in Korea, 1,000 employees in India and we’re building a presence in Brazil. All of this means we’re a global company and we need a global communications and collaboration system that just works.

When we began our search for a global solution, we were looking for an easy-to-use, standardized communication and collaboration system that would allow us to upgrade seamlessly over time, and around the world. After examining Google’s offering from an IT perspective, it took us less than a week to choose the Google Apps solution. At the time, our users had very limited IT resources, and expanding our old email system was an extremely slow process. We really needed to make a new investment that would make a difference quickly.

Making the switch to Google Apps couldn’t have been easier. We worked with Netkiller, a Google Apps reseller, to help us get up to speed with Google Apps. We’ve found that Google Apps for Business is the optimal solution for our growing needs. We love that it’s cloud-based, so we don’t have to worry about upgrading software on individual PCs.

Now that we’ve moved to Google Apps, we’ve been spared the ongoing cost and resource demands of hardware management, and we no longer worry about things like hardware capacity or storage limits with 25GB of email storage for every employee. As a result, our IT strategy team has been able to change its focus to the fundamental work of planning and leading our technology services. After seeing this kind of innovation at work within our company, we know that we made the right choice with Google.

From our employees’ perspective, Google Apps is very responsive; we can easily check email and access docs from anywhere. We can even use smartphones to review and edit documents. We’re making the most of other Google Apps features as well, including Google Talk (in Gmail), which we use for videoconferencing. Likewise, we’re using Google Calendar for its collaborative features, like the ability to input your schedule and share it with others.

Perhaps the most valuable outcome is that we can now collaborate horizontally rather than in vertical silos, making it easier for different groups to work together toward shared goals. Now we can quickly work across international borders, which helps us do things like reach immediate decisions with our assistant manager in Brazil. It empowers us all to make decisions, together, in real time.

I’m happy to say that we’ve gone Google so that we can save time, make decisions faster, communicate and collaborate more effectively, and be more flexible as we grow. Going with Google Apps is helping us become the best in the industry.