CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Industrial Mold and Machine Uses Socialtext to Serve Customers Faster Industrial Mold and Machine is one of those companies that works quietly in the background of American business, yet whose work touches the lives of millions of consumers each day. As the name might suggest, the company makes metal moldings for a variety of manufactured products, helping shape things like plastic cups, playhouses, sleds, milk jugs or kitchen utensils (to name just a few). According to Larry Housel, Knowledge and Information Manager of the Twinsburg, Ohio-based company, Industrial Mold and Machine needed enterprise social software to serve its customers faster and better. With employees residing both in the offices and the shop floor, Larry and his team wanted a central, searchable place to store meeting notes and customer information. He also wanted to improve internal processes and workflow by providing tools that enable the company’s employees to share information with each other openly. Industrial Mold and Machine turned to Socialtext enterprise social software platform and is leveraging the full solution suite from activity streams to workspaces for better collaboration and communication across its teams. Because Socialtext is a software as a service (SaaS) product, it’s easy for people on the shop floor to access our applications via a web browser. In addition, The Industrial Mold and Machine team installed Socialtext Desktop, an Adobe Air client that runs locally on people’s machines and provides an elegant and fast way to consume Signals, Activity Streams and other areas of our platform. “We want to appear as one unit in everything we do,” said Larry Housel. “To do that, we want process improvement. We have a lot of people thinking about how we can improve our daily workflow and serve customers better, and I want to capture that information. For instance, how do we accept a piece of material? Who needs to be notified? Who needs to be here for things coming in? These ideas will now go into a Socialtext for us to figure out, discuss, and act on.”
For the back and forth conversations that occur between employees during the day, Larry says Industrial Mold and Machine employees will update their colleagues using Socialtext Signals, our private, Twitter-like tool that enables people to share short messages with each other in real time. Industrial Mold and Machine wants more of its communication to happen openly, opposed to being locked away in e-mail boxes or people’s brains. “Signals allows all that communication to be searchable and discoverable later,” Larry says. “The more stuff we’ve normally done in e-mail that we can pull into a Signals is a victory as far I’m concerned.”
“Signals allows all that communication to be searchable and discoverable later. The more stuff we’ve normally done in e-mail that we can pull into a Signals is a victory as far I’m concerned.” Larry Housel Knowledge and Information Manager
Industrial Mold and Machine chose Socialtext because of the extensive social features that mirror those that employees use in their personal social networks. In addition, Industrial Mold and Machine saw benefits to the connectedness of the platform. From any wiki page a Signal can be chosen to alert colleagues to that action. From there it is easy to track changes and progress. Socialtext 5.0 makes it easy for distributed workforces such as Industrial Mold and Machine’s to effectively communicate and collaborate across the enterprise - improving work processes, creating a tighter internal alignment and better servicing customers.
About Socialtext Established in 2002, Socialtext, a Bedford Funding Portfolio Co., was the first company to deliver social software to businesses. By unlocking knowledge, expertise, ideas and data, Socialtext eliminates information silos across the enterprise to drive superior business performance. Socialtext’s enterprise social networking products — including microblogging, blogs, wikis, profiles and social spreadsheets — provide simpler ways for employees to share vital information and work together in real-time. Delivered in a variety of hosted cloud services, as well as on-site appliances, enterprise customers are provided with flexible deployment options that meet their security requirements. Built on a flexible, web-oriented architecture, Socialtext integrates with virtually any traditional system of record, such as CRM and ERP, enabling companies to discuss, collaborate, and take action on key business processes. More than 6,500 businesses worldwide have accelerated their business performance with Socialtext, including Egon Zehnder, Getty Images, Symantec, Meredith Corporation, NYU Stern, OSIsoft, and Epitaph Records. To learn more, visit www. socialtext.com. Designated trademarks and brands mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.
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