Projects

Managing Content Saves Money & Improves Decision-Making::

Problem

Like many companies its size, a Fortune 50 company suspected that its purchase of outside research and news was not only costing more than necessary, but was also not distributed in ways that maximized its value to the corporation. They wanted an assessment of their current situation, and suggestions for making improvements.

Solution

Acting as consultants to the corporate officers, a team interviewed executives, researchers, planners, sales and service groups, and procurement staffs throughout the corporation to create a picture of what was happening. As suspected there was little coordination among departments or work groups that purchased information. In fact, the corporation was often paying multiple times for the same material. In addition, decision-makers often did not know that information relevant to their top concerns was available in a neighboring unit. And even if the materials could be traced, it was difficult to aggregate resources quickly when needed by managers. The value being received for the corporation's investment was clearly less than it could be. Even an effort to have three corporate libraries share catalogues didn't do much to help: the libraries were often physically located in different cities than the people who needed the information. A few researchers used the libraries extensively, but most employees were not even aware of their services. In short, the corporation was vastly underutilizing purchased information and therefore gaining significantly less value than it should from its purchases.

Once executives understood the suboptimal results they were getting under current processes, they accepted a recommendation for a comprehensive overhaul of the company's content management processes. Initiating new procurement and budgeting processes that encouraged cross-departmental coordination, the company cut duplicate costs immediately. They increased access to the purchased information by a series of steps that included converting purchases from paper to electronic copies, automating the importation of information into a common searchable database, and using their corporate intranet to distribute the information. To make everything work efficiently, a new 3-tiered application added security and tracking protocols and allowed authorized users to create specialized workspaces to house information useful to particular work groups or projects.

Result

By instituting a rational process for identifying and meeting needs, the company decreased its expenses for purchased information by 30%. And at that reduced cost they were able to buy 4 times the amount of information . . . adding new resources that were identified as needs during the review process. By intelligently applying technology to the problems, they also rapidly recouped their investment in the development of a new content management application. When people in sales, planning, and procurement began to use the newly-available information to improve their own results, the value of information became quite visible. One procurement manager enthusiastically cited a $1.5M savings in the first year attributable to business intelligence accessed through the new process.

Other Projects

• Custom Application Aids Geographically Dispersed Units
• Underperforming System Gets New Life
• Library Saves Time and Effort with New Application
• From Custom to Off-the-Shelf