Dropbox for Business speeds workflows for a Georgia-based manufacturer

KSB subsidiary GIW Industries makes the heavy-duty slurry pumps needed to keep waterways navigable and extract minerals from the earth. Being in the dredging and mining business means Grovetown, Georgia-based GIW has customers — and therefore employees ­— all over the world. These employees in the field need to collaborate closely with headquarters on designs, as GIW customizes pumps based on individual customer needs.

Working together across different offices and time zones hasn’t always been easy for staff at GIW. “They would utilize email mostly,” says Lucas McCuistian, Supervisor of Server Operations. “And you would end up with four, five, or six different versions of the same document.”

We now have a single location where our design team can work on... pieces of information, add to them, and modify them. — Scott Gillum, Product Manager, GIW Industries

That’s where Dropbox for Business came in. GIW decided to give the cloud-based collaboration network a try after a rep from its hardware supplier Dell — a Dropbox for Business strategic partner — suggested the the service would make it easy to access and share files from anywhere.

With Dropbox for Business, GIW can provide better and faster service to its customers, says Product Manager Scott Gillum. “Being able to actually be on site at a customer’s location, take documents, drawings, pictures — and have those instantly transfer back to our design team has been very helpful,” says Gillum. “We now have a single location where our design team can work on those pieces of information, add to them, and modify them.”

Inside the company, IT help tickets related to file-sharing have declined at least 80%. And that email problem? McCuistian says he’s been able to cut the maximum file-size quota for external emails by 80% thanks to all the collaboration now occurring through Dropbox. “We can maintain a smaller IT staff and get more done,” he says.

We recently paid a visit to the company’s headquarters to learn more about how Dropbox for Business is helping GIW across the globe work together: