Improving user efficiency in a Notes environment

Earlier this month, we ran a survey with our FT Search Manager users.

We asked them how much time, per employee per week, they thought the FT Search Manager was saving them.

The average answer was 1 hour 23 minutes per person, per week. That equates to a saving of 8.3 days per person, per year, as described by the users themselves.

Note that we restricted the survey results to 'general' searching only, e.g. Mail/Archive & Application searching, because companies using the FT Search Manager for Discovery/Compliance searching have specialised search requirements, saving even more time, as shown below in the Appendix.

Saving each user over 8 days per year is a huge efficiency improvement. And because the FT Search Manager has a once-only, per-user price between $3 - $13 per user (depending on volume), it's also a fantastic ROI.


Example
A company with 1000 users implements the FT Search Manager, with a total product cost (once-only), of $7750. After 1 year, they've saved 66,400 hours, or 8300 days.

That's the equivalent of adding another 33 employees. And at an average US salary of $48,000*, well over $1,000,000 in potential productivity gains.

And the great thing is, the same gains are made year after year.


This is achieved because more efficient search tools make much better use of your existing data. In this case it's our search tool, but it could be any.

For more information, demonstrations, or to set up a trial, please visit http://www.ionetsoftware.com/search.


* source: http://www.ofm.wa.gov/trends/economy/fig102.asp



Appendix: Specialist Searching
Survey responses received from companies using the FT Search Manager for Discovery/Compliance/Specialist searching;

"Well FT Search Manager is now an absolute 'must' for XXX. Because of the volume of data we have to split it across multiple databases. And what the users are searching for is the number of times a particular device failure for a specified device from a particular manufacturer has happened in the last n months. The results will be in a minimum of 2 Notes databases - active and relatively recently completed investigations. ......So they use it every day, a lot. Anything up to 40 people use it to process 250 - 300 reports a week. If it saves them 5 minutes per report then that would be up to 1500 minutes a week."

"It can save between 20 minutes a week to many hours. It is most useful as an administrator when I get asked to perform a legal discovery search where I can search for a string of words in a date range in 3000 odd email archives. I could not do this previously."

"For us, it's about how much time it saves each time we get an open records (Discovery) request. In the past it would take often several hours per request (about 4 requests per month). Now it takes a maximum of 30 minutes per request. The other benefit is that the search is consistent across mailboxes and the criteria can be printed for future reference."

"Our Legal department request me to do a search over a number of user's databases (incl archived mail ) and export all data to an external harddisk. I have done this several times and I could not have done this without the FT Search tool."

"What it did do at the time when we used it was save us 100's of man hours sifting through mail files and collating that into results"