Industrial Mold Uses Enterprise Microblogging and Social Software To Serve Customers Faster

By Christopher Lynch | January 14, 2010, 2:05 pm | 0 Comments

One of the coolest parts about working at Socialtext is to see the diversity of our clients and the types of businesses they run. Today, I’m happy to announce one of our newest customers, Industrial Mold & Machine. Industrial Mold 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 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. So Industrial Mold turned to our enterprise social software platform, and is now using secure enterprise microblogging (Socialtext Signals) and wiki workspaces.

Because Socialtext is as 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, Larry installed Socialtext Desktop, our 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,” Larry told me this week. “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 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 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.”

So why did Larry and Industrial Mold choose us? He told me he likes the fact that the social features in our product mirror those that employees use at home, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, he appreciates how each social feature ties in nicely with another. For example, when you edit a wiki page in our platform, you can choose to Signal that action to your colleagues so it appears in their microblogging stream, where they can click on the link to view the changes made to the page.

We’ll be tracking Larry and Industrial Mold’s progress, and we’re happy to welcome them to the Socialtext family.