TrueCar goes Google with SADA

Client

TrueCar, Inc. is a publicly-traded, digital automotive marketplace dedicated to price transparency for buyers of new and used cars. Users receive upfront pricing information when they connect with more than 14,000 TrueCar Certified Dealers, allowing them to enjoy a more confident buying experience. TrueCar also powers car-buying programs for over 600 companies, including some of the most trusted brands in the world, such as USAA, AARP and American Express. The company’s 2017 total revenue grew by 16% over 2016, to $323 million.

Challenge

Justin Slaten, Senior Vice President of IT & Security, TrueCar, worked with the executive leadership team to audit their existing IT infrastructure. They came to the realization that their current hosted Exchange email platform was no longer meeting their needs.  Keeping up with the scale of the business, and an ever-changing landscape of client operating systems and browsers were key concerns for TrueCar.

It had become cumbersome to manage a thick client environment and they were finding it more difficult to implement certain corporate security policies, such as multi-factor authentication. Finally, TrueCar wished for better ways to support the company’s small offices and large field staff. The company decided to invest in re-platforming its technology stack, creating a more agile, stable, and collaborative IT environment. This led them to evaluate Google Workspace, Google’s enterprise cloud email and collaboration platform.

Solution

Due to Slaten’s previous experience in deploying Google Workspace elsewhere, he was confident that Google’s cloud collaboration suite was a great fit for TrueCar’s present and future productivity needs. Google’s native capabilities and strengths around security, collaboration, and scale assured him it was the right solution to address their IT challenges. Realizing he needed an implementation partner, Slaten looked to SADA after hearing of their successful track record with Google Cloud projects. Slaten selected the cloud and IT consulting firm to handle their data migration and training.

“TrueCar is a very fast-paced, ever-changing environment, and we like to be on the cutting edge of technology. We’ve been doing a lot of work to upgrade and streamline the platforms we use in order to set us up for infinite and immediate scalability. We also choose platforms that enable us to constantly innovate. Google Workspace checks all of those boxes, and we look forward to continuously evolving the way our company collaborates within the Google Workspace ecosystem.”

– Justin Slaten, Senior Vice President of IT and Security, TRUECar

After successful migration, SADA spearheaded the change management efforts by facilitating employee roundtables and surveys, aiming to identify potential roadblocks in workflow during the transition. One of the most important transitions was the ability to replicate TrueCar’s old email and calendar setup for users that were accustomed to a certain workflow. The team was excited to find out that Google Workspace comes with UI customizations that can be tailored to a user’s preference and even have the look and feel of other email and calendar tools.

“I worked with SADA to not just merely replace that functionality but make it even better in Google,” he says. A significant advantage is Google’s hallmark speed of innovation. “When we migrated, I knew that our admin staff was going to be unhappy without Outlook’s side-by-side calendar view,” Slaten says. “But before long, Google released an update that introduced the same feature.”

SADA also met Slaten’s desire to escalate the migration timeframe by several weeks. SADA adapted its best practice migration and change management plan to meet TrueCar’s timeline. The process took only six weeks from start to finish.

“Truecar employees were ready for the change to collaborate better in a secured environment. I knew that with great training and change management plans, we can move fast and get everyone migrated smoothly.”

Benefits

SADA completed the migration and core change management program for TrueCar in May 2018. Slaten was extremely pleased with the change management services that SADA Systems provided.

“SADA took change management very seriously, and accommodated us with a mixture of on-site and remote training opportunities for our users. They had a very friendly and empathetic approach, but pushed new process over replicating what people were used to in Outlook/Exchange. This is a very important part of such a big change.”

Benefits of Google Workspace include:

• Increased security and protection from phishing and cybersecurity attacks
• Easier provisioning of new employees
• No more thick clients to manage and secure
• Better support for mobile users with Google’s OS-agnostic online application suite.
• Less strain on the helpdesk – Google’s easy to learn platform has resulted in a culture of power users who answer questions and resolve problems for others.

With the migration behind him, Slaten says he’s looking forward to continued work with SADA on support and change management projects as they arise: “SADA really cares about our success, and from a training and change perspective, they are second to none.”