Challenge: Fragmented information was slowing Huish down

Stan Ferguson, Head of IT at Huish Outdoors, has worked with some of the largest corporations in the world throughout his IT career, and his experiences have led him to a key insight: file disorganization is a widespread struggle for most companies today. 

This challenge was especially clear at Huish, an international company specializing in diving equipment manufacturing. “We have 250 employees spread out across Italy, Vietnam, Canada, and the US, and they all have their own approaches to saving and organizing data, which can get messy,” Stan explains. 

But employees weren’t just storing information in different ways, they were also storing it across a range of different tools: SharePoint, One Drive, Outlook, Dropbox, and more. This fragmentation meant employees would have to search across each tool individually—sometimes for hours—to find the precise information they were looking for.

Huish Outdoors wanted a better way to surface the information its employees needed, when they needed it, so searching for information didn’t slow down more important business tasks.

One option was to migrate all of Huish’s information into a single storage tool, but that would have required time-intensive data migrations and retraining staff on new tools and processes.  

But then Stan discovered Dropbox Dash.

Solution: Dropbox Dash helps Huish search every connected app at once

With Dropbox Dash universal search, Stan and employees can now search for the information they need across all of Huish’s connected platforms—Dropbox, OneDrive, Outlook—from a single search box.

“We can search by name, account number, a word in the body of an email—almost anything, and find what we need all from a Dash search,” Stan explains. “Dropbox Dash is the best tool I’ve seen for finding the data inside emails.”

Making all of Huish’s information available in this way has had a profound impact on how fast Stand can perform his job. Before Dash, if Stan worked on a file years ago and couldn’t remember exactly which platform that file was stored in, he’d have to scroll through countless emails and file systems in hopes of finding it. 

Now, with just a name or a phone number, Stan can quickly pull up a project file in OneDrive, a conversation in Outlook, or a contract from Dropbox. Plus, he can filter by platform if he already has an idea of where a document is.

“Dropbox Dash saves me hours that would otherwise be spent combing through millions of folders across different systems,” Stan says.

Dropbox Dash has expanded across the organization, too, with both the Engineering and Accounting teams speeding up the way they work.

When Huish’s Engineering Team creates 3D diagrams for different types of diving equipment, they need to locate specific part numbers. Using Dropbox Dash to search entire databases helps find exactly what they need with just a name or a word, significantly speeding up their work.

Huish’s Accounts Team is seeing similar results. Dropbox Dash means they can search all of their organizational information for account numbers to find invoices that need to be paid, without sorting through millions of folders or emails. “Before, the accounting team’s data wasn’t very organized, but Dropbox Dash is helping pull the information they need all together so they can get more done in less time,” Stan says.

When Stan first considered Dropbox Dash, his primary concern was maintaining privacy and security across the organization. Because Huish was already a Dropbox customer, Dash simply applied the same safeguards with strict controls. If an employee doesn’t have access to a file, for instance, that file will come up blank when they search through Dropbox Dash.

While Stan and his team mostly use Dropbox Dash to search for files, they also use the AI answers feature to generate summaries of projects. For Stan, these summaries serve as time savers when he needs a refresh on older projects.

The Huish team also uses the Stacks feature to group folders and site links from different tools in one place, which makes it easier to share multiple files at once when collaborating on projects.

As Stan and his team continue to build out the company’s organizational infrastructure, including a Contact Center, he’s confident Dropbox Dash will make employees more efficient and enhance overall operations. Stan says, “Dropbox Dash saves me and my teams valuable time and effort by making information accessible in a faster and easier way. It makes everyone’s jobs easier and more productive.”

Results: Dropbox Dash saves time and simplifies information for Huish 

Reduced search time
Using Dash universal search, Huish is finding documents across all of its file storage and information apps in seconds from a single, easy-to-use interface.

Use cases across the business
Teams across Huish’s business are finding applications for faster search in their day-to-day work, from IT to Engineering to Accounts.

Dropbox-level security and privacy controls
Dropbox Dash maintains the same security protocols as Dropbox so you can rest assured all your information is protected and only available to the right parties.