The Business
Founded in 2008, Extreme Reach is the global leader in creative logistics empowering brands and agencies everywhere with an all-in-one platform for the activation of omnichannel marketing campaigns.
With over 1,100 employees across 140 countries, Extreme Reach’s global creative-to-media supply chain answers the challenges of today’s complex marketing landscape and equally complicated infrastructure underpinning the global advertising ecosystem.
The Challenge
Following their acquisition of Adstream, Extreme Reach wanted to consolidate their productivity platforms. Adstream had adopted Microsoft Office 365 across their business, while Extreme Reach was using Google’s product suite. Following an extensive evaluation of their options, Extreme Reach decided Google Workspace was their best solution as it was already utilised by the largest audience and for many reasons would ultimately create less disruption across the company.
Extreme Reach recognised that this was an exciting opportunity for newly migrated Workspace users, and those more experienced users, to benefit from the cultural and communication benefits of Workspace, as they came together with Adstream to form one organisation.
With 400 users across 20+ countries, complex Teams workflows, and a vast amount of data, Extreme Reach knew this was a considerable technological and people challenge to tackle.
This was the catalyst for their engagement with CTS. With change at the heart of the Workspace Delivery team, CTS could manage both the technical migration and the cultural aspects of change management.
The Solution
CTS’s approach to transformation went beyond a baseline migration, focusing on driving adoption across the organisation. After setting up a Centre of Excellence, the Managed Services team at CTS were equipped to ensure continuous adoption of Workspace.
For Extreme Reach, it was this engaging change management approach that was vital to delivering a successful outcome, which would further integrate the two organisations following the acquisition. Through a global network of 47 Google Guides, Workspace Early Adopters, and advocates within Extreme Reach, CTS helped provide Office 365 users with an understanding of the equivalency of their tools on Workspace, as well as the differences.
As a time-crunched organisation, a series of Microtraining sessions were also made available, which reached over 70% of the workforce. Critically, CTS highlighted how Workspace offered a more simplified way of working not only with Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Docs, and Drive but with Appsheet to further broaden the opportunity for working effectively out of a single collaboration platform. In one particular instance, Appsheet was also used to create a custom Workflow specific to Extreme Reach.
Communication was key to delivering this successfully. “A migration project like this requires constant communication and check-ins,” said Mark Annati, SVP, IT, and CISO at Extreme Reach. “We dealt with a few surprises, but the number of issues dropped to a trickle after the transition date.”
“A very visible and active sponsor was a key to the success of this project! Mark was the face of communications across the business, with local teams, leadership and Google Guides. He truly was the biggest advocate of Google Workspace, sharing all the new things he had learned with everyone he spoke to, building great momentum for the project,” said Cesca Ashcroft, Senior Change Manager, CTS.
Results
By bringing all of the productivity tooling into Google Workspace, it now means there is a tight and more integrated approach to communication across Extreme Reach. “This is where the value of our investment is and will continue to be seen – moving as a single unit, vs. working out of disparate systems,” explains Mark.