Category: Business Process Management

No, this is not one of those spam-filled blog posts that touts mysterious “work from home” measures to earn more. This is actually about a study.

That’s right – a recent study revealed a correlation between an increase in work hours and pay hikes.  As the Harvard Business Review summarizes it:

For young, highly educated workers who usually put in long hours, working 5 extra hours per week is linked to a 1% increase in annual wage growth, according to a study of thousands of U.S. workers by Dora Gicheva of the University of North Carolina.  

It seems to make sense, doesn’t it? Working more equals making more money. However, what sort of work is performed during that time? Is it composed of valuable projects that address critical business objectives and priorities? Or is it time bogged down with inefficient activities such as paper pushing or tracking someone down for a status update?

At Onit, we believe in working smarter, not harder.

For example, take this Fortune 100 global industrial company. An internal audit revealed process weaknesses around sales activities. Although the design of these processes was effective and compliant, the execution of these processes suffered due to user inconsistencies and a lack of transparency of the overall progress toward goals. People were often over-included or the process could take an inordinate amount of time to complete.  

This probably wouldn’t be so a large inconvenience for a smaller company. But for a company that deals with multi-million dollar sales quotations and deals on a regular basis, it was vital to quickly and consistently produce, review and finalize quotations and contracts in order to increase profits. 

The company introduced a mass amount of efficiency into its sales quotes and approval activities by introducing Smart Process Apps from Onit. It eliminated the need for manual tools that stored information across multiple databases of information – think documents, spreadsheets and emails. Its flexible workflow automated the review and approval process as well as provided a valuable platform for time-saving collaboration.

The adoption of Smart Process Apps from Onit greatly increased the transparency and speed of the quotation review process. It has now been deployed to the company’s worldwide sales force and has significantly accelerated the quotation review process.  To date, quotations worth billions of dollars have passed through the app for review at a far quicker pace than email review.

With this in mind, perhaps future studies will record how much more money individuals can make with working smarter, not harder.

Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

When compared to a majority of business professionals, lawyers aren’t lemmings. While many professionals may chase the shiniest new trends or toys, risk-adverse lawyers prefer to thoroughly evaluate options.

According to a new survey, after years of talking about legal process outsourcing, in-house lawyers are now actually embracing it. The LPO study, conducted by Corporate Counsel, discovered that more than half of the respondents 1.) have outsourced legal work and 2.) been satisfied with the results.

The adoption makes sense. Legal departments face shrinking budgets and further demands for cost reductions from the C-suite as their units transform from the traditional model of unforeseen costs to controlled environments of expenditures. Plus, today’s typical legal department faces a marked increase in workloads as well as a growing need to quickly produce results for their clients.

Likewise, the resistance to adopting this trend that has been around for decades is also understandable as in-house lawyers question if their work will remain secure, if quality will suffer and if it is even worth the trouble. In fact, the top two reasons for avoiding LPO stemmed directly from quality concerns and value in terms of time vs. savings.

One forward-thinking organization quoted in the article stated that they improved LPO and by hiring a project manager who worked hand-in-hand with the LPO attorneys in India. This makes sense, as a majority of the “pain” surrounding LPO often relates directly back to the tools used to manage it – spreadsheets, documents and emails which limit visibility and impair results.

Imagine if you had technology to act as your project manager. Gone would be the endless emails, the outdated information on spreadsheets, calls from clients asking for updates and time-consuming searches for information and statuses.

Companies have done this – and greatly increased the results of their LPO initiatives – by adopting Smart Process Apps. Not only did they increase the efficiency of LPOs, but they also wrangled large savings with a small App. You don’t have to believe me. Take a look at the LPO eBook on legal process outsourcing and read about the success legal departments achieved.

Image provided by sheelamohan and freedigitalphotos.net

In his 2010 report on Systems of Engagement, Geoffrey Moore posed the question:

“Why aren’t the applications that are critical to any organization as easy to implement as an app on an Android device or the iPhone?”

Even in today’s enterprises, this question remains relevant. Often coinciding with the trend of difficulties in increasing employee adoption – both from old and new employees – for systems of record. The effort to update a record, without passing on any context, does not provide enough benefit in the modern workplace.

So, when a Fortune^® 500 company needed to improve compliance with the complex process of managing the Microsoft T-36 program – a 3-year, complex, contractual customer service process that can yield millions in profit margin dollars when executed properly – it knew it needed to turn towards a more engagement-oriented solution.

The Engagement Layer – Smart Process Apps

Having a documented process is not the same thing as actually updating the current status, knowing who is responsible for the next step, and when each task will be completed. This kind of information is usually handled outside the system, most often through email, typically initiated by the task or process owner as he/she tries to chase the task down at each step in the workflow.

At this Fortune 500 company, they discovered only a 40% compliance rate for the documented process within their CRM to manage the Microsoft T-36 program, resulting in fewer successful resolutions and leaving money on the table.

Smart Process Apps are changing the way companies think about workflow. Apps provide the advantage of focus. They can be constructed to deal with a single process – like T-36 task creation – and provide an online, collaborative workspace that provides workflow automation and visibility to all stakeholders.

Apps are built around how users work. The interface is direct and focused on the needs of a single process. Without an extensive training program, anyone can start generating data about their process using an App. Now, when a change is made, it can be noted within that workspace and be immediately available to everyone – no forwarding of email necessary. When one person completes a step, the next person is automatically notified, and everyone can see who is the active stakeholder at any given time.

Using Smart Process Apps as the front-end System of Engagement through which their employees will interact and make updates, the company expects to raise compliance rates from 40% to 70% within 6 months. This type of immediate ROI cannot be had from typical enterprise software.

Data Integration – Connecting Smart Process Apps to your Business

While the end-users benefit from the focus and simplicity, the data generated from the process can be used to update other systems.

This was another critical factor for our Fortune 500 client – the data created through the Onit App needed to be pushed into its system of record to maintain the integrity of the data and track outcomes of the processes. As systems of record are often used to kick-off other processes, this synchronization from Apps will ensure that all the pieces keep moving for critical processes.

In addition to systems of record, Apps can be connected with many other systems. This Fortune 500 company sends data to their CRM tool to enable sales pipeline development and to Microsoft Outlook to synchronize tasks for key stakeholders. We will explore these two critical tasks in more depth in our next post.

Image courtesy of sheelamohan and freedigitalpictures.net

Legal Process Outsourcing – like other forms of outsourcing – can be an extremely complex process for a Fortune® 500 corporate legal department. It may work with LPO services around the globe including Argentina, Australia, France, the Philippines and South Korea.  Outsourced work can include anything from records management, patent applications, research, motions or briefs, eDiscovery and compliance assistance.  When LPO is successful, law departments realize cost savings, higher levels of service, dedicated expertise and the ability for in-house counsel to spend more time with clients and priority matters.  

One such company, one of the world’s largest business services firms for sales and marketing, works with 500-plus companies worldwide and across multiple industries. The law department discovered in 2012 that its supply of internal legal resources would be unable to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from internal client teams for legal support. Significantly increasing internal headcount was not in the budget, so the company began a project to change the way it allocated work and introduce new tools to manage legal work – all with an end-game goal of increasing efficiency, performance and cost savings.

The company realized that it needed the right technology to properly source and track the hundreds of LPO RFPs it generated to outsource projects. In the past, the company had used spreadsheets to track vital information. However, a project of this size could not be adequately supported this way.  It turned instead to Smart Process Apps.

With Smart Process Apps, the corporate legal department could track and report on legal matters, allow different members of the legal team to be assigned to work on matters, share electronic files and facilitate communication between onshore and offshore teams.  It automated workflows of the RFPs and matter work, improved the integration of client and legal teams around the world and enabled internal clients to have visibility into the status of agreements they submitted for review. 

The Smart Process Apps’ tracking and workflow tools allowed any user to submit work to the legal team and route the work to the correct team member. The tools enabled all users to have a dashboard of work, easily generate reports on their work and quickly ascertain an overview of the legal process overall. The Smart Process Apps also developed a contract repository that links to the workflow tool to easily manage the renewal process.

With Smart Process Apps, the company was able to:

• Establish more predictable and managed outside legal costs.
• Reduce overall costs to deliver legal services that allowed for increased resources to address the growth in volume.
• Create a more predictable turnaround time that has decreased in time.   
• Focus on utilizing resources more effectively and transparently with internal clients.
• Create repeatable processes that can be supervised by an attorney but implemented by an outside service provider.
• Install a focus on increasing the efficiency and transparency of our work processes. 

The end result? The LPO initiative – supported by Smart Process Apps – led the company to increase predictability in overall outside legal costs, create a faster turnaround of work and better communicate within the company about expectations for the cost and timing of legal work.

Corporations are struggling to migrate into socially enabled organizations but fully recognize the complexities involved with this transition, according to a recent study.

The study, conducted by Oracle, Social Media Today and Leader Networks, complied results gleaned from 900 marketing and technology executives worldwide.

The study defined a “socially enabled enterprise” as:

A set of collaborative processes that have the potential to yield improved business processes that are customer-driven such as a faster time to market with new products and services, more successful research and development outcomes and refined market messages that are explicitly influenced by customer needs.

The study identified a strong adoption of social platforms in polled organizations, with organizations with more than 50,000 employees leading the charge more successfully than smaller companies.  A majority of the respondents considered this part of a strategic agenda but also conceded that it would not be a simple transition.  

One finding that drew our interest here at Onit included the need for collaborative processes as a basis of a socially enabled enterprise.

Traditionally (and especially in large government agencies or Fortune® 500 corporations), organizations adopt enterprise software to handle tasks that may appear simple but are exponentially more difficult due to a larger number of the tasks of the same nature performed within the organization.

For example, think about a corporation executing a contract. Contracts can come from any number of different departments – Sales with a new customer, Procurement with an inventory order, or any department starting work with a new vendor. Legal must be involved – that’s a no-brainer. But once they begin negotiations, the information is loaded into legal’s enterprise software system which holds updates and notes only the legal department can access.

Any additional clarification, question, or redlines are handled outside the system via email, phone calls, or hallway discussions. This administrative overhead to keep everyone in the loop is too high to make collaboration feasible for every contract. This leaves invested stakeholders unable to access information about the status of a contract or provide valuable input to move it toward completion.

All of this combined makes it difficult for the multiple parties involved – for example sales, legal, and their clients – to easily ascertain an update on progress, the latest version of amended documents, discussions that may be holding up the document and how long overall it is taking overall to finalize the contract.

This is where Smart Process Apps comes in. These process-specific, light-weight apps are adept at handling tasks of this nature while housing all documents and discussions in one easily accessible repository, shepherding the contract through to completion and breaking down all obstacles to collaboration.  They make getting a status update on a project as easy as clicking on a link.

Forrester estimates that the market for Smart Process Apps will grow to $35 billion by 2015. Taken into context what they enable and how easily they enable it in a social business, this isn’t a large surprise.

Want to learn more about Smart Process Apps? Read our breakdown at onitprostg.wpengine.com/forrester.

Apps have come a long way in a very short amount of time. In 2009 when they began to gain wide-spread acceptance, they were primarily known as a new (albeit slightly chunky) way to access important information on the go – be it the weather, email or schedule. Now – a mere four years later – Apps have extended their clever (and sleek) influence beyond individual consumers and are cementing their usefulness in a corporate environment. This new breed of Smart Process Apps can play a vital role in any corporate department.

Call them part of Business 2.0. They’re leaner, more productive and less expensive than traditional software.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our newly launched Onit App Market. It features more than 20 Smart Process Apps from Onit that tackle complex processes for compliance, HR, IT, legal, procurement, real estate and sales. They simplify and streamline important components of corporate success including contract administration, employee onboarding or termination, legal holds and board kit distribution.

Over the coming weeks, we will highlight our various Apps. But in the meantime, visit the Onit App Market to learn more about Onit Apps or request a free demo. It’ll be your first step to app-ifying your processes.