How Whirlpool Corporation is driving digital transformation with Google Cloud

When I first joined Google Cloud back in November and met with customers across every industry to understand the challenges companies were faced with, it became clear that companies in the manufacturing industry were looking to improve the quality of their decisions, crunch vast quantities of data to achieve unprecedented clarity, and reduce time to market for their new products. Whirlpool Corporation immediately impressed me, not only because they’ve been a longtime Google Cloud customer, but really in how they leveraged productivity and collaboration solutions to support their digital transformation journey.

As early as 2014 Whirlpool Corporation, the world’s leading manufacturer and marketer of major home appliances, with $21 billion in annual sales and more than 70 million products sold each year, faced the need to innovate faster. Innovation became a critical point of competition in the global market for appliances, and to increase the speed of its product development, Whirlpool Corporation needed to transform its corporate culture environment and tools. To meet this new challenge, the company embarked on a journey to design the “Winning Workplace.”

To enable the necessary changes in workspace design and shift the company culture, Whirlpool selected Google Cloud’s G Suite, a new productivity suite that would redefine the way 92,000 employees collaborated and engineered around the world.

To select the right collaboration platform, the company turned to its users. “We held a ‘bake-off’... essentially tech fairs with three competing products to allow our colleagues an opportunity to interact with the tools and see what they preferred,” explains Whirlpool Corporation VP of Global Information Systems Mike Berendsen. “They overwhelmingly selected G Suite.”

Five years into its journey to build the winning workplace, Whirlpool Corporation continues to make huge strides toward being a cloud-first organization, supported by ongoing benefits from using Google Cloud’s G Suite productivity applications, including specific features:

• Eliminating the need for version control on presentations using Google Slides.
• Building real-time visual dashboards using Google Sheets; and
• Quickly integrating newly acquired businesses through the ability to immediately begin sharing Google Docs and other information via Google Drive.

The company’s speed of innovation with G Suite continues to grow, thanks to the empowerment of its employees who work together to adopt these new tools across internal teams and external partner organizations.

“This was the beginning of our transition to the cloud, both for the enterprise and our global IT team,'' Berendsen says. “Since that success, we have further strengthened our strategy to go ‘cloud first’ with our platforms. We now have over 80% of our transactional workloads in the cloud, and it stemmed from the success of transitioning to G Suite.”

With Google’s Next Mile Program, Whirlpool Corporation is maximizing its investment in G Suite by streamlining tools for cost savings and standardizing its digital workflows.

As Berendsen explains, “We’re five years into the journey and have realized outstanding  productivity gains by going Google and through the Next Mile program. We will continue to capitalize on this opportunity to shape the way we work and drive the change associated with that.”

I would like to thank Whirlpool Corporation for choosing us as their partner in their journey to greater collaborativity and productivity with G Suite. Here at Google Cloud, we look forward to continuing our innovation with G Suite to enable more enterprises to work more efficiently and effectively from anywhere in the world.

For more information on how G Suite is powering manufacturing businesses, visit our website.