At Makita we pride ourselves on our power tools being the absolute best in brand. We sell in excess of 1000 product lines and we believe every one of these product lines lead its category in the market place.
We know how important it is to provide back up support for the products we sell, due to this we continually strive to ensure our sales and service teams are the best. We have a particular focus on vendor relations and on end user support, so much so that our customer service teams go through regular training to keep their knowledge of our products and their service skills completely up to date.
Makita’s passion to be the best has been realised through many factors, one of the most important of which is our embracing of technology to stay at the cutting edge of innovation. This year we celebrated our centenary, with our continued prosperity showing that we have well and truly stood the test of time.
In Australia this year we are embarking on a major update of technology that we’re confident will see us further build on our reputation as being the best to do business with and the best place to work.
“We’ve had a good look at the market and Microsoft technologies seem to be best in class”
Leading the change will be the installation of Windows 10 on around 260 of our devices, which we plan to have completed by November.
And why Microsoft? Well, we see them as being completely in accord with our search for excellence. We’ve had a good look at the market and believe Microsoft technologies are best in class.
As part of the Windows Insiders program for business, we’ve been able to trial Windows 10 before its release. I can tell you that we have tested it, we’ve used it, and we’ve tried to break it (unsuccessfully, I might add). We love it and we’re going to be pushing it out to the business at large.
We like that it fits with our image of excellence but we also like that it gives us the ability to easily adopt any new technology that hardware vendors come up with in the coming years. Mainstream support of Windows 7 has already ended; it will soon be going the way of the dodo, so we want to equip ourselves for the future.
Alongside Windows 10, we have deployed Office 365 and rolling out Skype for Business which will allow us to link our Executive and remote teams. It’s a pretty exciting time, but we think it’s essential in order for us to remain competitive and productive into the future.
For us one of the big selling points is the implementation of virtual desktops through the Task View feature. A lot of our people have a number of varying roles as well as being sales focused, so being able to organise desktop views so they can have a several jobs on the go at the one time will be a real boon for the multi-taskers, allowing them to go back and forth between either open apps or multiple virtual “desktops” of apps.
“I like the security which comes with Windows 10, particularly Windows Hello which uses biometrics – your face, iris or your fingerprint – rather than passwords to launch . . . “
I like the security which comes with Windows 10, particularly Windows Hello, which uses biometrics – your face, iris, or your fingerprint – rather than passwords to launch Windows 10 devices, which should help enormously with security, allowing us in IT to authenticate without having to store a password on the user device or on a network server.
The Passport feature will also be handy as we are a multi-national company accessing internal systems hosted all over the world and requiring people to verify that they are in fact in possession of the device – through using a password or Windows Hello – before we are able to access a certain sites will be a great help and boost for security.
It’s an exciting time for Makita in Australia because the way we operate today is going to be very different to the way we operate in six months’ time and that change is being driven by the initiatives that we’re undertaking now.
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