Save time, money with Grab and Go

Laptops are the home base where your employees go to connect, collaborate and get their work done. So when a laptop isn’t working, the effects are greater than simply the cost of replacement. In addition to the hours employees devote to troubleshooting devices instead of completing projects, there’s the time your IT team spends on repair and replacement when they could be focusing on more strategic initiatives. In fact, IHS estimates that IT downtime costs a large enterprise $60 million a year.

But what if you could decrease that lost time from hours and days to just a few minutes? Enter Google’s Grab and Go program. Employees can use self-service stations to quickly borrow and return devices.

Chrome devices and Chrome Enterprise are the key ingredients that make this program so effective. With Grab and Go, centrally-located racks with fully-charged Chromebooks are available 24/7. As soon as an issue arises, employees can grab any of these devices and log in through their corporate account. Because their work is already stored in the cloud, they can jump back into projects immediately, as if they never left their old device.

The Grab and Go program makes life easier for IT admins as well. Chrome Enterprise provides simple manageability through the Google Admin Console. Employees sign in to the Chromebook and all of the company’s management policies are immediately applied upon startup. This ensures that employees are using a secure device and can access all websites, emails and documents they need to do their job. And all of their bookmarks, passwords, extensions, browsing histories and personal settings are available on the new device thanks to Chrome Sync.

Employees using a Grab and Go Chromebook automatically get an email upon sign-in that explains how and when to return the device, plus instructions on how to extend the loan, if needed. Upon return, devices can go directly to the next user. No reset or setup is needed because Chrome OS encrypts individual user profiles by default.

Google has deployed Grab and Go in many of their offices around the world and the program has seen more than 30,000 unique users rack up more than 100,000 loans in 2017. In fact, Grab and Go program administrators estimate that their initial investment in deploying the program paid for itself in productivity time saved after only 50 days.

Because the program is so simple, Grab and Go is also an ideal solution for other business cases where employees require temporary access to a device. 

• Frontline workers who only need devices for short periods of time—such as for training or sending emails.
• Shift workers in workplaces with shared devices, such as healthcare and call centres and can use virtualisation solutions through Citrix and VmWare to access legacy apps.
• Remote workers who travel between office locations, or frequently work outside the office and need both a work and home device.

So, whether to reduce IT downtime or make daily operations easier, Grab and Go can offer a solution for your organisation. As a Google Cloud Premier Partner, PointStar has the experience and know-how to help enterprises develop, build and run the Grab and Go program. Click the link below to start the ball rolling.