The query

A customer poses a critical question towards one member of your sales staff. The latter cannot answer or treat the query due to a lack of all the relevant information and data. He promises to call the customer back.

Personal research

The employee starts his own research and looks for the necessary documents and information on different typical media:

1. In the local filing system of his PC. A typical search on the desktop lasts about 5 minutes.
2. In his mail inbox, where a search lasts about 2 minutes.
3. In shared directories or central netwok drives which comprehend a huge amount of data and sometimes comprises several servers: length about 8 minutes..
4. In paper filing systems or manual hold files. Length about 15 minutes.
5. In direct communication with his colleagues.

In total a typical research lasts 30 minutes working time – for just one query!

Research with other employees

Due to the fact that information and files are frequently not available at once, you turn to your colleagues now.

1. In this example our staff member sends an E-mail to 4 colleagues. He has to draft and send his mail. Length about 4 minutes.
2. The colleagues get the mail, read it and start their own research. Length about 34 minutes.
3. Some staff members are out of office, are sick or maybe on a holiday. The mail cannot be answered which does not prevent them from starting their research upon being back to work.
4. There might be additional relevant information available somewhere in the workspace that are researched as well.

By involving just four colleagues, an additional working time of about 140 minutes was blocked.

Analysis of the research

Our staff member receives various mail replies and reads all information – the redundant ones, too. This process lasts about. 15 minutes.

The answer

Finally the staff member can call the customer and can discuss or answer the query. This means that the customer had to be patient and that he might criticise the company’s service.

Conclusion of the classical research for a single query

We made the experience, that a lot of deciders do not believe in figures like those mentioned above. Quite the contrary: a software solution like the DocuPortal one is not applied for calculated but for felt like benefits. We would like to recommend to reconsider this matter basing on the information given above.

If you extrapolate this working time to real costs you will be astonished that 10 t 50 % of the day are waisted by searching information.

Scenario when using an ECM

An Enterprise Content Management solution like DocuPortal, aims at merging all files and information in one surface. All the business relevant information are immediatly detectable and are complete at the employee’s disposal. As a rule, a research will not last longer that 2 to 3 minutes now.