Go paperless! Lighten your business load

You may start off with bank statements, letters, receipts, business transactions, and inventories only to find that you've collected a stack of folders which eventually turn into a shelf full of boxed paperwork.

Well, what if you could evaporate all that weight up into a cloud and reference it at your fingertips, whenever, and wherever?

Thanks to technologies such as Google Drive, going paperless can really help your business. It not only helps clear cluttered workspace in the office, but also saves money and eases your business' environmental footprint. (Not to mention less trips to the printer too!)

Here are a few practical reasons why you should go paperless with Google Drive:

• Security and Focus: You no longer have to worry about losing or misplacing your documents. No more distractions on your desk

• Space: Enables you to save valuable office storage space. 

• Mobility: Allows you to have access to all your documents in one place even outside the office. 

• Time: Saves valuable time.

• Money: Save costs ranging from printing paper, photocopying, and printer maintenance.

• Recovery: Disaster recovery.

• Peace of Mind: Ensures security and privacy.

Of course, all you need is Google Drive with an account and a scanner. You can also use Android/iOS smartphones or tablets to upload files as PDFs. Here are some Epson scanners that can scan directly to Google Drive with a couple of button clicks!

Google Drive uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for easier search results once documents are uploaded to the Drive. Essentially, Drive turns all your scanned documents into searchable text for easier future referencing. OCR also enables you to save time by dismissing you from specifically naming saved uploaded documents. Instead, all you have to do is search a key word or tag from the document you wish to find and its right there at your fingertips.

Additional storage is cheap at $1.99 per month for an extra 100 GB or $9.99/month for an extra 1 TB or switch your organization to Google Apps Unlimited with Unlimited storage for $10/user/month

Drive also allows you to create and collaborate with others like share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on the fly with complementary Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms. You can even make files available offline when you are not under cloud connectivity.

You may find Google Drive for Work as one of your most valuable investments once you have made the transition to go paperless. You can work without limits. It is safe, secure reliable, easy, powerful, and built to optimize your individual and team productivity.

We have advanced to communicate paperless with instant messaging and email. Why not do the same with organizing documents and files paperless too. It's still early 2015 and not too late to save time, money, and some trees while your at it.

Going paperless is a great idea and our team here at Interlock IT will help you make paper filing a thing of the past.

Feronia Inc.: Bringing a Company Together with Google Apps

Founded in 2008, agricultural enterprise Feronia Inc. has spent the last several years pursuing a far-reaching ambition: to develop large-scale, sustainable agriculture in Africa. Based in the Democratic Republic of Congo and with a network covering thousands of square miles, Feronia is a formidable operation that has quickly built itself a prominent reputation within the DRC and beyond— it is not only one of the largest employers in the DRC, but also the first African agri-business to be listed on a North American Stock Exchange.

Of course, overseeing such a large network of 4000 employees spread throughout a developing nation larger than the size of Western Europe that includes three palm oil plantations, a farming operation, and headquarters in Kinshasa, was a sizable task for the company in the beginning.

“There were virtually no communications [systems] on the plantations– it was very ad hoc.” says Bill Dry, Chief Executive Officer of Feronia. Everything from daily operational demands like time logs to “big picture” details like the refurbishment of the plantations were stalled again and again by a lack of a manageable and comprehensive system of communication across the enterprise.

“If you can imagine,” Dry elaborates, “these plantations have been operating for 100 years in very remote locations… to run our business on a daily basis we need information and reporting.”

Making day to day operations manageable… in a country the size of Western Europe

Feronia decided to reach out to Interlockit for a viable and sustainable solution, and found it with Google Apps. “We made a strategic decision to [migrate] on to Google,” says Dry. “It was the best solution for our company and in the region. With 4000 people, we have payrolls to do, cash to move around… we need up-to-date numbers to do our business. In the past, this was a very difficult thing to do. Now, we’ve got the daily input we need to manage our business.” 

The retrofit of the plantations was also facilitated by the transition. “With a big refurbishment program and bringing equipment in from overseas, we have to schedule all of our plans and paperwork… Before, this was taking a long time to filter down to headquarters— now we can get [the information] on a daily basis.”


Enjoying the benefits of communication

An unexpected benefit of migrating to Google Apps was what it did for company morale. Many of Feronia’s managers are based in rural areas on-site at plantations and isolated from their families in the capital city of Kinshasa. The flexibility of Google Apps communication interface has made it dramatically easier for these key players to stay in touch with their families. This has eliminated stress and increased productivity for the company. “In addition to being an excellent communication tool, [Gmail] is also a very good social tool,” says Dry, “It means that our workers are more content working there.”

Plus, with Google Apps the company is able to fulfill an obligation not only to its employees, but also to the 45,000 people who live within the vicinity of their plantations. “We are the only business in those regions… we have a lot of people relying on us. Prior to us taking over, there were no communications in place for those workers.” Now with Google Apps in place, the company is able to support a communication infrastructure for the entire community. This has resulted in some considerable savings for the company, according to Dry. “When you have had zero communication, just the delay of trying to operate on a daily basis has a huge [financial] impact on the business.” Since implementing Google Apps to facilitate daily operations and communications, the company has experienced thousands of dollars in cost savings on a monthly basis. 

Google Apps also helped facilitate relationships with current and potential shareholders outside the DRC, according to Sangeet Sood, President & CEO of Osaka Capital, the firm that handles Feronia’s investor relations. “We track all conversations with investors [with Google Apps] through our CRM,” says Sood, “that’s how we do a lot of our outreach. Everything is connected seamlessly from our email into our database of contacts which is thousands of names, actually. The integration has made it very easy to successfully communicate with our investors.”


Looking to a productive future with a sustainable solution 

In the end, one of the biggest assets for Feronia in partnering with Google Apps is that, as an agri-business focused on sustainability, Feronia was able to align itself with a solution in lockstep with its company ethos. Feronia has always been focused on pursuing a green agenda in its operations across its enterprise and was pleased to be able to eliminate the need (and energy drain) of extensive servers by pursuing an environmentally efficient cloud-based strategy with Google Apps.

Moving forward, Feronia sees Google Apps as the right fit for expanding the company’s business and operations. Plans are in place to grow Feronia’s farming operation using a Brazilian model of farming that is new to the DRC— a user-friendly and comprehensive communication system is just what Feronia needs to make this work. Plus, Google Apps flexibility and user-friendly structure is a system that Feronia knows it can grow with, whether they are relying on young, tech-savvy graduates or older management who are unfamiliar with technology. “We know as we move forward that more people in the company will use it more, understand it more and we’ll benefit more.”

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Last blog post... 4 weeks ago. What kept us busy in April

Lots on the go but having tons of fun.  Here's some of the things that kept us busy in April at Interlockit.com:

• Interlockit.com is mentioned in a PC World Article on Google Apps Sync for Outlook - note our mention of the improved return on investment with the web interface over sticking with outlook.  I am an accountant (CMA) after all...
• Hiring and mentoring of new technical staff members
• Joint presentations with Google Canada on Google Apps to a large group of franchisees in the transportation industry.  It was very successful... We'll share the exciting details in the future
• Lots of client deployments of Google Apps
• Received official Canadian reseller status for a brand of high quality internet routers.  Google Apps shines when we clean up the customer's internet connectivity and massively improve throughput and reliability.  We'll broadcast more details once we have the e-commerce site up and running
• and... my vote for best new feature among many released for Google Apps Premier Edition in April is Drag and drop file attachments

Introducing... My Interlock IT blog

I'm a bit strange in being a professional account (CMA) with an insatiable curiosity for technology and gadgets.  I'm lucky that my wife of 16 years, Lesley, a psychotherapist, puts up with my constant tinkering and spending on the latest gizmo's.  Take for example, the birth of our first child in 2003, when I pre-built a website to host all the baby pictures and then spent too many hours trying to find a web cam that could see in the dark.  I ended up buying a camera solution from one of the baby monitor manufacturers that required too many steps to use the picture-in-picture on our TV, and had horrible image quality and lots of static... but I wasn't willing to give up.  Lesley had to stand by the TV and constantly give me feedback until I finally figured out the one spot on the wall that produced a reasonable image but required rearranging all the furniture in the baby room.  What normal wife would put up with that?

Anyway, back to the topic at hand.  For me this blog is about contributing tips that will hopefully help others with their business and technology challenges as similar contributions from others have helped me time and time again.

I love figuring out things that stumped everybody else and most of my solutions are found by scouring the internet forums for ideas. Some would say I'm gifted in my ability to make things work but it comes naturally when you love doing it.

Certainly, I also hope that my blog will generate referrals which are so critical to the long term success of an organically grown consulting firm.