You can’t improve what you can’t measure - it’s a good starting point for successful business process optimization. 

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In difficult financial times, optimizing all aspects of your business can decide the faith of your company. That is why more and more companies are deciding that they want to make sure their staff is staying on point when it comes to their duties. 

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During the last several years, Insightful has counted numerous working hours by employees from different industries via our time tracking software. The benefits of implementing such a solution in their environments differ from one client to the next, which is why we decided to showcase the problems they faced and how we helped deal with them. 

NOTE: The Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) we have with these particular clients prevent us from divulging any names. We are vigilant about protecting their privacy while using our work productivity tracking software. 

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Logistics Industry

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The challenge: The client is a company in the logistics industry with 800 people working in the back office. Aside from providing transportation (via road, rail, ship, and air - nationally and internationally) they also offer warehousing services. 

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This, of course, requires a lot of planning and coordination, the staff spends all of their time working on computers carrying out a lot of different tasks using an ERP.

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However, implementing Insightful’s screen monitoring software has revealed that the employees were spending far too much time using Microsoft Excel without utilizing its full potential. In essence, they were using it as a simple calculator when it could have performed an array of complicated calculations. 

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The solution: Having Insightful’s office time tracking solution identify 25% of employees spending a critical amount of time in Excel, management decided to implement additional Excel training. 

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The result: With further Excel training under their belt and improved skills, the staff was able to work more efficiently and process 18% more orders - a direct proof of the overall productivity rise.

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Furniture Industry

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The challenge: The client is a furniture manufacturing company from Serbia with an export line to Germany. After implementing Insightful’s PC monitoring software, they have discovered that there was a language barrier that severely affected the efficacy of the entire operation. 

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While the employees were doing great in spoken German, they were wasting a huge amount of time using Google Translate during written correspondence. Not to mention the consequences that level of inaccuracy left on their brand in the eyes of the customer. 

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The solution: Management organized language courses for the employees and made German the official language of their internal communication. 

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The result: Only three months after starting to monitor employees with Insightful software and pinpointing the problem, the first significant improvements were noted. Now using German with greater efficiency and in a more comfortable manner, employees were able to send up to 25% more emails on a daily basis. This, in turn, resulted in an 8%-increase in sales revenue. 

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Computer Software Industry

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The challenge: The client is a software company that has developed a platform for online gambling and has a support team of nearly 250 engineers. 

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Their managers suspected that they sometimes slack at work and decided to implement Insightful’s time tracking project software so they could measure every minute of their working day. 

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What they saw was exactly how long it took each employee to act on a support ticket once created by a customer - and the results were much worse than originally anticipated. The average pending time of resolving an incident was roughly 45 minutes instead of expected 20. 

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The solution: After investigating what caused the delay in ticket resolution, the client decided to ask for help from an HR consulting firm with the intention of lifting the motivation and morale among staff. They implemented various management activities to improve work productivity that were advised and measured their employees’ performance throughout the entire period. 

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The result: After six months of closely monitored workplace activity and job satisfaction improvement effort, support ticket pending time decreased from an average of 45 to as low as 27 minutes. 

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Digital Marketing Industry

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The challenge: The client is a digital marketing agency with a number of freelancers on their payroll. The sheer amount of projects they are working on has caused them not only time allocation issues, but also problems in how they are billing and getting billed for their services. 

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The solution: Since this agency needed to implement billable hours tracking - on the project, campaign, and client level - Insightful’s flexible tracking capabilities allowed for precise information gathering in service of getting billing right on all sides. 

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The result: The agency is now sure the freelancers they’ve hired for particular services aren’t overcharging them. Moreover, they are able to calculate client rates properly and ensure staying within the allocated budget. Finally, time management and resource allocation are running smoothly now as they have a constant stream of usable information on the way things are getting done. 

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Architecture Industry

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The challenge: The client is an architectural firm from Malaysia with over 500 employees working in office and on-site. With that kind of workforce volume, the company had difficulties with employee activity monitoring. 

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The solution: In response to the specific needs of the architecture, construction, and engineering industry, Insightful has developed a way to monitor work in a structured way. Based on their file naming methodology, Insightful's software was configured to track activity time and project management without even starting the app - simply by knowing the way the employees are naming their files.  

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The result: Not only are workers more efficient by simply being more focused on their tasks, but it also shows in the end-of-the-year balance. The company is estimated to be saving $3.24 million every year. 

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General Observations

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Companies that implemented our in-office and remote employee time tracking software and took our advice about not telling their employees about being monitored at first had better results than those that disclosed tracking staff working habits. The only exceptions are those companies that were on a tight deadline or in peak season.

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If the law allows it, our recommendation is that managers don’t share this information with employees for the first week after installing our software in order to collect realistic data and get a clear understanding of their current situation. 

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After the first week, when the employees are informed that a new time tracking system has been installed and their activities are being monitored, there is an immediate increase in productivity of 10-11% in comparison to the period before. As time goes by, this number gradually decreases to 4-5% and it stays there if no further action is taken. 

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Therefore, it stands to reason that it’s not enough just installing a software to monitor activity on the computer of your employees and leaving it at that - it is just a step towards changing the company culture into a more productive, but also highly satisfactory one. 

This article was originally written on November 1st, 2016 by Marija Grgur. It was updated on June 18th, 2020 by Aleksandra Djordjevic.