The Business
Haymarket Media Group is a global specialist media publisher. The organisation publishes content from nearly 60 brands, including marketing magazine Campaign and automotive media titles What Car? and Autocar.
Headquartered in the UK, Haymarket employs approximately 1,500 people across offices in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and Germany.
The Challenge
Having now been a Google Cloud customer for more than seven years, Haymarket wanted to streamline the management of its Workspace accounts. The media publisher knew it was paying for more accounts than it was using, as a result of people leaving the business and accounts not subsequently archived. Haymarket needed a solution to help them successfully control and manage their data to ensure they were getting the most from the digital workplace, so they asked CTS to support.
The Solution
To ensure Haymarket was utilising Workspace effectively and efficiently, CTS’s dedicated customer success manager (CSM) worked with the media publisher to understand the business’ existing IT processes, as well as onboarding and offboarding workflows. The CSM’s role was to report back to Haymarket on the performance of its systems and processes, and recommend new areas for improvements.
Simon Turner, Head of Operations Technology at Haymarket, said: “Having a dedicated customer success manager at CTS has been incredibly helpful. The reports the team produces include important insights that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to gather ourselves. As a result, we’ve been able to make important decisions on how we operate and change our actions.
“Working with our internal communications team, we initiated our Your Digital Life series to help drive adoption throughout the company. Thanks to our CSM we had a better understanding of new Google Workspace features, so everyone can make the most of the technology we have available.”
The improvements made to how Haymarket uses Google Workspace has meant it now holds nearly 70TB of data in the system. With easy information sharing part of the system it has ultimately improved collaboration across the organisation.
CTS also worked with Haymarket to understand how many additional Workspace accounts the business was paying for that were no longer in use. To improve the offboarding process for the future, CTS recommended that the media publisher used CloudM’s management software, CloudM Manage, which would allow them to securely manage all of their data in one platform.
The Result
By taking advantage of powerful automation features within the product they were able to simplify their onboarding and offboarding processes by creating powerful, automated workflows for their joiners, movers and leavers. This also meant they would be able to streamline many timely administrative processes and improve overall productivity.
Following a short trial period using the system, and Haymarket agreeing the system was right for them, the media publisher was able to reduce its number of Google accounts by nearly a quarter, reducing operational costs across the business.
Simon explains: “Our relationship with CTS has been enormously beneficial for our overall business. The changes to our Workspace accounts have allowed us to drive down costs where we can – which is ultimately the most important benefit of any partnership like this.
“With the help of CTS, we’ve been able to adopt a smarter and more efficient way of working. CloudM Manage allows us to simplify and accelerate the leavers’ process, which frees up the time of our operations team, allowing them to focus on tasks that add more value to the organisation.”
Moreover, CTS worked with Haymarket to further enhance collaboration across the business. For global firms, having a collaboration tool where staff can communicate seamlessly is vital for a well-run organisation. As such, CTS and Haymarket rolled out Google Meet hardware across the business and to its bookable meeting rooms in the UK to improve how staff work together, while also reducing admin time.
In the height of the coronavirus pandemic in March, Haymarket saw a nearly ten-fold increase in the use of Google Meet, with typically 3,500 meetings a day on the platform.
Simon adds: “Google Meet has been essential to keep our teams connected, particularly whilst everyone is working remotely. The quality and reliability of the service have been second to none, which is extremely important for a dynamic organisation like ours.”