Established more than a century ago, Pegadaian has made a name for itself mainly in the pawnbroking industry in Indonesia. However, in order to keep up with the competition from new lending service businesses and to appeal to the younger generation, it understands the need to embrace new technologies and upgrade its current workflow processes. Keeping a mindset that change begins from the inside, the company turned to G Suite to improve its internal communication processes.
Beyond appealing to the younger generation, Pegadaian is also looking to expand its business in the financial world, growing its services through digital products such as fintech lending. To launch its digitisation efforts, Pegadaian started a Transformation Office, an open innovation platform that serves as a catalyst to drive change from within the company and works as a functional organisation to lead the transformation in Pegadaian.
With G Suite at the helm of its digital transformation journey, it supports all of Pegadaian’s communication channels across the company, as everything is centralised in the cloud. They used to work with very limited email attachment allowances and an unreliable mail server but now they can send much larger files without worrying about them not getting through.
Moving away from on-premises systems to cloud means that employees have a more flexible work environment. Employees are confined to a fixed clock-in time. This gives them more flexibility without compromising productivity. Employees can also store their work in Drive, so they can access their files anywhere, anytime.
G Suite also serves as a project management platform across Pegadaian’s 4,100 branches across Indonesia. The ability of Docs, Sheets and Slides to allow different people to work on the same document in real time helps project managers track the progress of their projects easily.
Working with partner agency PointStar, Pegadaian developed a G Suite portal that serves as a knowledge base for employees.
“With advice from PointStar, we went with a ‘train the trainer’ system, where a representative from each region is trained on G Suite, and can then train their peers. Through this strategy, we are able to effectively reach every employee across all branches.”
Aditya Rachman, VP PMO and Change Management at Pegadaian
With more than 13,000 employees across thousands of branches, the migration from an on-premises email system to cloud could have been a challenging process. But according to Haris Dermawan, Enterprise Architect at Pegadaian, the project couldn’t have gone more smoothly.
Being able to connect on the cloud without disruption means that employees can reduce the number of in-person meetings. They have managed to cut more than 50% of travel costs by having meetings on Hangouts Meet.
Although it has only been less than a year since using G Suite, Pegadaian already has plans to look into other Google Cloud products, such as Vision AI which are currently undergoing trial runs as part of its sandbox projects.
Although there are still barriers, such as regulations by Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority that requires all financial data to be stored on a local cloud, he believes it is only a matter of time before the entire organisation can be hosted on Google Cloud.
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