I am currently employed as the logistics and office manager for medium sized, New Jersey based fashion company. Currently in my day to day operations I use Google Drive as my main form of cross computer sharing but it wasn't always so. I have grown up in the era of laptops, texting, Facebook and Google so to me these technologies are no strangers. Conversely, a majority of the other employees at my company are significantly older than I and as some of them willingly admit they are "completely out of touch with social networking and technology".
Every year I spend a good portion of December and May coordinating purchase orders (POs) to send to China and India for our next season's inventory. My boss and I would spend hours correcting and editing these POs, tweaking prices, quantities and even colors and fabrics for weeks - via email! (Ancient history - I know) To me email is great way to communicate quickly with people all over the world but when you are trying to coordinate with someone who is in the same building as you it can get a little hairy. I cannot tell you the amount of times that I have starting working on PO1 and my boss happens to be working on that very same PO and we end up emailing each other our "new" version simultaneously. (Only to leave me just short of weeping over my desk at the thought of having to re-do my changes into his version). This past December I tried to convince my boss to use Google Drive as a way to store all of our POs in one place that would always keep track of the latest version (seeing that Google Drive saves any changes made automatically). He was a bit skeptical about this "Google thingy" (Yes, his words not mine) but as I explained the benefits of it he seemed to come around to the idea of a new office system.
Since all of our company emails run off of Google already it was a very easy transition from email to drive. I spent about a half hour showing my boss and our fashion designer how to upload and access shared files in the drive and they were able to catch on in a matter of minutes (Much to my delight - my "students" were not as technologically out of touch as they had let on or led themselves to believe). Within hours we were able to get up and running on our new system and we coordinated and completed all our POs within two weeks - a process which normally would have taken us 3-4 weeks to complete to satisfaction via email (Mainly because our designer works out of the office most of the time and isn't very good at checking her email in a timely matter)
Now we are a small company. There are only 5 employees in our design office but because we were able to implement Google Drive so rapidly into our purchasing routine I was able to help our graphics and design teams on board so they could share specs (the measurements for each garment we make) and design layouts (how the print/pattern is going to be laid out on the garment) without the confusion of "Am I adjusting the latest version?" "Did so-and-so work on this dress while I was out last week on vacation?" "Does anyone know where the spec sheet is on so-and-so's computer" and all the other pitfalls that occur when working with sharing documents via email.
Now luckily for my office I was experienced with Google Drive (I have been using it for school and my own personal things for a while now) so the cost of having an IT guy come in and spend time and money on training was not necessary. Also, since we are such a small staff it was much easier to get everyone on board in a short period of time. I taught my boss and our head fashion designer in a half hour one day and our graphic designer and assistant fashion designer in about 45 minutes the next afternoon. Seeing how easy and simple the system is for cross computer sharing made everyone's work life a bit easier and kept the stress down (office wide I might add) during the buying season.
For us Google Drive was a simple fix to a silly problem but it was one that saved us a lot of time and headache in the long run.
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