The client’s multinational engineering operations rely heavily on cloud services to enable close collaboration across its global business. Time spent waiting for collaborative tools to load, or poor application performance greatly affects operational efficiency at the firm and can incur losses in revenue in addition to wasted payroll paid to employees as they wait.
Skype for business had been the firm's critical communications channel but multiple sites were experiencing poor service quality, particularly in China where revenues generated are the third highest across their global business. The extent to which degradation in collaborative tools was impacting the company’s bottom line was proving to be immeasurable for the task force set up by the company, who could only confirm anecdotal evidence of poor experiences in lieu of any actionable information.
Without data-driven evidence they were at risk of continuing to waste as much as 3% of annual payroll.
They subsequently engaged with their service provider, to help provide them with the actionable data needed to both identify weakness in their digital infrastructure and optimise the efficiency of their collaborative tools to protect revenue generation and reduce wasted payroll.
Their provider chose to initiate a one-month project to assess the digital ecosystem at 50% of the engineering firm's primary locations (approximately 20,000 employees), using Actual Experience' Human Experience Management analytics, specifically targeting Office 365 applications, Salesforce and Dynamics CRM and of course their collaborative cloud applications.
Upon completion of the digital assessment, Actual Experience compiled a concise report providing the client with an estimate to the extent that operational efficiency was impacted in terms of lost revenue/wasted payroll due to employees waiting for key cloud applications.
A conservative estimate of time lost due to poor human experience, at the time of the initial assessment, an average of 6.5 minutes per person per day. The operational impact to the business equated to £11 million a year in payroll paid to staff while they wait for systems to respond across all of the site evaluated. Using information provided by the company, deployment and solutions specialists at Actual Experience opined that, had the assessment been extended to all global sites, the expectation would be that the annual wasted time would extend to at least £15 million.
The company took immediate action based upon evidence in their first assessment report - which had identified that infrastructure that was specific to the local geographies at sites in China did not support the optimal delivery of Skype for Business. Microsoft and its Chinese ISP were identified in the report as the responsible infrastructure suppliers and, utilising Actual Experience’ synthetic measurements, a significant reduction in wasted time was achieved by switching from Skype for Business to MS Teams.
The assessment report and recommended areas of improvement contained within enabled the company to confidently improve the components of their digital business that were creating frustrating experiences for staff. They were therefore able to improve the quality of services for staff and directly impact the bottom line of the business.
Aside from the worst affected sites, lost time was identified across several other key global locations. Performance at these locations was being impacted to a far lesser degree than their colleagues in China, but, the number of employees throughout these sites with poor human experience stood to represent a significant impact to the business by way of lost efficiency and wasted payroll.
Both company and their service provider understood this to be an opportunity to extend the project beyond the initial Digital assessment by Actual Experience, into an ongoing continuous improvement service for the entire global business.
Each month a new report correlated, for each location, the top impairment to operational efficiency. Pinpointing the precise area where focus was needed within their digital supply chain. The company was able to take the actionable information from each report and continually reduce the impact to their business caused by poor human experience. Recommended improvement areas produced by Actual Experience each month guided the business to recovering staff productivity at all locations by saving an average of 1.2 minutes per person per day, on the way to a forecasted saving of £2million in the first year.
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