DINA – From Start-up in the Basement to Innovation Leader
In 1987, the young engineer Dirar Najib started his company in the basement of his family home. His idea of drive monitoring for machines revolutionized industrial automation technology. For over 30 years, the family-owned company DINA has been an innovation and technology leader in safe industrial electronics with the goal of revolutionizing medium-sized businesses.
What was the Challenge?
DINA was faced with the task of creating a working environment that would enable modern ways of working, such as location-independent working that would help the company continue to grow and drive ideas forward more quickly.
Legacy software often turns out to be a serious obstacle that costs valuable working time. At DINA, this was particularly true of the mail system, which could only be accessed within the office location and did not allow integrations with other systems.
In order to be able to work during business trips or from other locations, Stefan Najib, Managing Director of DINA Elektronik, always had to make tedious preparations. Other teams were also slowed down by the old systems because, for example, no integration of the CRM system HubSpot was possible for evaluating digital campaigns.
What is the Solution?
In November 2019, Stefan Najib, as Managing Director, made the decision to introduce Google Workspace in the company and Marcel Graewer, as Leadlink IT, developed a plan for the introduction.
Just one month later, Marcel was able to get started with migrating the data. He was positively surprised by the fact that new users can be created much faster and the general administrative effort is significantly lower: “In the same time it takes me to create a new user at Microsoft, I created five new users in Google Workspace.” Marcel Graewer (Leadlink IT)
After another month, the implementation of Google Workspace at DINA was already complete. Email management was switched from Exchange 2010 to Gmail, and document processing was replaced with Google Workspace collaboration tools.
As a business manager, I am often on the road. The fact that I couldn’t access all the important information on the road annoyed me. An acquaintance introduced me to Google Workspace. The simple organization in the browser convinced me. Video conferences with other companies work quickly and more stable now even from home office.
How could Seibert Media support?
Seibert Media advised DINA on the introduction of Google Workspace and supported it in preparing for the migration from Exchange 2010 to Gmail and Calendar as well as in license management.
To ensure a smooth and secure handling of Google Workspace, Seibert Media trained selected key users who subsequently served as multipliers in their work areas.
In addition, Seibert Media continues to be available to DINA for all questions about Google products.
What results can be achieved?
Google Workspace has significantly reduced the administrative workload in IT. In the area of collaboration, around 35 percent fewer tickets are received. The browser-based tools enable teams to work together much more flexibly.
Even working smoothly outside the office, on business trips or the home office is now no longer a hurdle for all employees at DINA.
The Covid 19-related switch of almost all employees to the 2020 home office was thus also not a major problem for DINA. Video conferencing within the teams and with other companies also now works quickly and stably.
At the beginning, I was rather skeptical about Google Workspace. However, the simplified administration more than convinced me from the first “look & feel”. By using Single Sign On (SSO) and the user-friendliness of the tools, we were able to reduce our collaboration tickets by 35 percent.
