3 ways technology has made a big impact on happiness

The following offers a flavor of how digital has added the happiness factor for three Sogeti clients:

A digital vehicle for learning

Giving people access to the information they need, when they need it makes a valuable contribution to happiness. And that’s what Sogeti did in partnership with Microsoft for ROC Friesland College in the Netherlands. We delivered a SMART Workspace solution to the College in just one month to enable students to study wherever and whenever they want. A key feature of this solution is the student portal in the cloud – an online environment where students can easily find, use and share all educational information, applications and administrative information in one central location.

We developed the portal with a responsive design that ensures the look and feel are the same on a tablet, PC or smartphone. Moreover, the portal has single sign-on: logging in once is all that’s needed to open the required educational information and apps, such as Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, Yammer and Skype. Our work on this project has since been acknowledged with a prestigious industry award coming our way at the 2017 Computable Awards. We received the Partner Award alongside Microsoft and ROC Friesland College.

Mobilizing a service salesforce

Equipping employees with the digital tools they need to get their jobs done without any hassle makes a major contribution to their happiness. Sogeti’s solution for US firm Cintas did just that. Cintas has 30,000 employees, of which 10,000 are service sales representatives (SSRs). They’re out on the road driving trucks, delivering uniforms, maintaining and inspecting first aid and fire systems, and providing other services at customer sites.

They use mobile devices used to scan barcodes, create invoices, and carry out other tasks. However, with small screens, limited ports and expandability, and an inability to run Windows desktop applications, the previous devices were becoming a barrier to business efficiency. The SSRs were having to return to their trucks or offices to access company systems and transmit the day’s transactions.

Sogeti worked with Cintas to replace the handheld devices used by its 250 Fire Division SSRs with Windows  tablets. We deployed and tested the device, helped Cintas design a Windows image that was highly secure and optimized to support the new devices, and we tested corporate applications on the tablet. The SSRs can now perform daily tasks more efficiently without returning to their trucks to sync data. They can also deepen customer relationships and increase revenues by selling additional Cintas products. As a bonus, Cintas can reduce hardware refresh costs by moving to Windows tablets. It’s a win-win situation all round.

Revving up mobile capabilities

When employees have more flexibility in determining when and where they work, they get more done. That’s the premise of a program launched by Delphi Automotive, a leading global supplier of automotive technologies. The UK firm has a globally dispersed workforce and sought to compress the time and distance between employees across the world and speed up decision making.

Delphi launched a program called Connected Worker, aimed at providing employees with better digital tools to give them the mobility, performance, and collaboration capabilities they needed to get their jobs done.

As Delphi’s IT partner, Sogeti helped to build the necessary Windows platform, roll out the devices, and train employees. Modern tools also help attract talent, as the firm’s Senior Manager of Collaboration Services Sean Murphy explained: “When candidates see our employees walking around with tablets and using Skype to join videoconferences with colleagues around the planet, they think, ‘These people get it; they are investing in the right tools”.