With a large workforce and 50,000 sailors deployed abroad around 100 ships at any given time, the U.S. Navy needs secure, effective and consistent collaboration tools to help connect with personnel at regional shipyards. That’s why the Navy’s Naval Sea Systems Command turned to Google Workspace.
According to Google Cloud, the company’s Public Sector department directly assists Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA)–the Navy’s largest systems command–by providing support to the U.S. Naval Ship Repair Facility and Japan Regional Maintenance Center (SRF-JRMC) in Yokosuka and Sasebo, Japan. Armed with the threat protection and zero trust capabilities in Google Workspace, NAVSEA uses Google’s suite of productivity tools to communicate between the SRF-JRMC and Navy stakeholders around the world.
The Tech Decision
First, the SRF-JRMC facility had to solve two unique challenges: ineffective collaboration and communication, and a language barrier.
Before choosing Google Workspace, Navy officers in Japan would need to be on-base to communicate over a secure connection, and calls were typically held late at night due to the time difference. When the COVID-19 pandemic came along, communication became even more challenging due to mobility restrictions.
The SRF-JRMC shipyard has more than 3,000 Japanese contract employees providing critical support, which presented a language barrier when communicating critical issues.
Secure, efficient and effective collaboration
Working with Google Public Sector, the Navy chose Google Workspace for the SRF-JRMC, bringing Google Voice for secure VoIP calling that allows personnel to join calls and sessions from on site or their home. And they can now reliably and securely communicate across continents.
In addition, Google Workspace includes solutions like real-time translated captions in the company’s videoconferencing tool Google Meet, which allows English to Japanese translations to help break down the language barrier.
The Google Meet platform has also proven cost effective, as it has saved the U.S. Navy “thousands of dollars a month” in phone bills by providing country-specific dial-in numbers for interviews, according to Google Cloud.
Other Google Workspace tools include Google Drive and Docs, and those help NAVSEA simplify human resource workflows by streamlining onboarding for local Japanese employees in the shipyard, according to Google Cloud. With a shared Google Drive, NAVSEA can eliminate the need to send multiple files back and forth among the team, which also helps minimize the need for on-premises storage.
Google Docs also enable Navy employees to communicate and collaborate with each other and potential candidates securely across any device, which helps SRF_JRMC CIO Peter Guo and his team ensure operational readiness and continuity of operations.
“Cloud collaboration capabilities provide us seamless and secure connectivity across continents and break down language barriers with our colleagues across the globe,” Guo says. “We’ve improved our ability to operate anytime, and anywhere and have increased our ability to securely communicate and coordinate especially during network outages and natural disasters.”
COVID-19 pandemic dashboard
Armed with Google Workspace, the SRF-JRMC created a COVID-19 Pandemic Dashboard with a Google-based site that consolidated Japanese and international open-source data on COVID-19 outbreaks and provided updated guidance, according to Google Cloud.
The dashboard, built in less than two hours using Google’s Looker Studio, leveraged an automated data collection process to track local hospitalization numbers. This allowed the NAVSEA team to access this information in real-time and shorten a process that previously took hours, according to Google Cloud.
According to Guo, the dashboard helped reduce redundant weekly meetings on COVID-19 updates and eliminated the 10 hours it took to manually gather data and present it via slide decks. This helped leadership make real-time, data-drive decisions and put necessary risk mitigation in place, he adds.
“It empowered supervisors across the shipyard to reference this website at any time and put additional health measures in place to minimize the transmission of COVID-19,” Guo says. “Every minute counts at our two shipyards in Japan, so this made a tremendous impact on our operational efficiency and ensured the safety of our sailors.”
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