by Julian Goldsmith

Hovis, Oxo move to Google Apps

News
May 28, 20121 min
Cloud ComputingIT StrategyManufacturing Industry

See also: Premier Foods CIO Profile

Grocery foods and bread manufacturer Premier Foods has migrated its office apps to Google Apps for Business, making a 50 per cent saving on operational costs.

The company, which owns the Branston, Hovis and Oxo brands will be using Google Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Google Talk and Google Drive.

Speaking to CIO UK, Premier Foods Group IS and Change Director Mark Vickery explained that the move was intended to free up staffing and investment resources from operational tasks so that they could be devoted to more strategic products.

“This move is in line with other programmes of change and simplification to our IT infrastructure,” he said. “It is complementary to similar activities around our core SAP ERP system.”

Although the migration to cloud-based Google apps and the associated pay-per-use pricing model has a cost benefit to the company, Vickery maintained the biggest advantage the move gave the company was the ability to extend business systems to remote and mobile staff.

“It’s much more about mobilising the company in terms of collaboration and moving into new areas of how we all work together,” he said.