Sunrider communicates worldwide in real-time with Google Workspace

Client

The Sunrider Corporation, or Sunrider International, is a privately owned company headquartered in Torrance, California. Sunrider manufactures health, beauty, food, and household products at four manufacturing plants: Southern California, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. Sunrider does business in 42 countries and operates offices in 22 countries. The company has thousands of franchise stores and tens of thousands of independent business owners and authorized business owners internationally.

Business challenge

Sunrider’s major manufacturing occurs in the Los Angeles area. Prior to moving to Google Workspace, Sunrider’s US-based offices were running off Microsoft Exchange, while other countries operated off a simple email server. Sunrider’s IT team was managing their Exchange server personally, while affiliates in other countries managed their own servers independently. While this system was functional, Sunrider was soon faced with the prospects of an Exchange server upgrade which was very large, and a system that was not cohesively used across their corporate and franchisee system.

The company was concerned with both the time it would take their resources to accomplish the upgrade, as well as the cost of the upgrade itself. Additionally, email e-discovery was troublesome to efficiently accomplish with their outdated server – in the case of an unsuccessful backup, Sunrider would face complications with their e-discovery process, an already rudimentary, time-consuming workflow prior to their Google Workspace migration.

Solution

Sunrider began to evaluate an email and collaboration solution that was both readily accessible and removed the burden of having to internally manage their own servers. After a product evaluation, Sunrider selected Google Workspace for its globally distributed servers and high availability, as well as its functionality via a web browser. Google Workspace offered an email solution that was readily available to Sunrider’s employees, who are dispersed throughout the world, and allowed Sunrider’s IT teams to redistribute the time they spent managing their server to other mission-critical tasks.

SADA worked closely with Jonathan Chen, Director of IT at Sunrider International, to implement Google Workspace across 1,300 users. From a technical perspective, the migration went smoothly, despite the fact that some of the systems their offices were running at the time were not supported by the migration tool. Sunrider also had massive amounts of data that had to be transferred to the new platform with fidelity. “We didn’t realize how much data we had to upload to Google Workspace,” said Chen. “SADA helped us set priorities for the migration and make it go smoothly so that it didn’t interfere with other business processes.”

Sunrider received on-site training, which the company found helpful as the migration rolled out. “It went quickly,” said Chen. “Many users already used Google Workspace as their personal email solution, so it made the transition simpler.”

Results and benefits

Post-deployment, the reception to Google Workspace has been very positive. Many users are active in Google Drive, while Docs are used for note-taking and real-time collaboration. For users in accounting and legal who are still using Office programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel, Google Drive becomes a useful hub to place all important documentation in a single location, that can be quickly and easily shared. Sunrider also enjoys cost savings as a result of not having to worry about system upgrades, while IT resources no longer have to devote hours or extensive effort towards server maintenance and backups.

The SADA team is very good at what they do – everything went smoothly, and it’s great that they still keep in touch with product updates. We strongly recommend SADA as an implementation partner, especially for medium-to-large sized companies.”

Jonathan Chen, Director of IT, Sunrider International