Sapience provides a
patent-pending, first-time-ever capability to
effortlessly track & analyze Enterprise Effort
and Time Productivity, that can help organizations to boost their overall business efficiency.
Sapience is a powerful patent-pending software product that can boost your
organization’s overall revenue and profitability
by plugging wasteful Effort and reducing
under-utilization of capacity. Managers can
reduce stress and burnout by identifying teams
and projects where there is sustained over-work.
Individuals and teams can optimize their Time
Productivity, which in turn leads to higher
quality of results, better client retention, and
satisfied employees.
What challenge does Sapience address?
Most industries use ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software for optimizing their delivery and operations. They have production targets, and precise information on total material used, person-hours of effort and actual output.
This is not the case at companies whose employees rely on computers to deliver their products and services. These are typically software product or services firms, IT teams at large organizations in various sectors, KPO/BPOs, engineering services etc.
These companies lack quantitative data on exact Effort on various projects and functions, and their different phases (like requirements, design, testing and support) and activities (communication, documentation, meetings, calls).
Recent trends are forcing them to measure Effort (which is currently attempted with timesheets and CRM type applications):
With more work being outsourced, clients are demanding accountability and assurance of time spent on their projects.
On Time & Material contracts, vendors are at risk since they do not have any documentation to validate hours claimed to have been spent on projects by personnel. Manual timesheets may not meet increasingly stringent audit requirements.
To cap costs, projects are increasingly becoming fixed price. It is estimated that fixed price contracts are already 30-40% of all contracts, and this will rise to 60% and more in the next few years. Fixed price bids require accurate estimation, which in turn demands proper Effort measurement of current work.
Anecdotal evidence is that over 50% of project teams are significantly over-worked for long stretches, pointing to poor Effort estimation.
Over 50% of cost is in employee compensation, yet there is no simple way to verify that employee Effort capacity is being fully utilized. It is estimated that 20% of employees may be working at 50-60% capacity or less, often because they are not assigned sufficient tasks.
Effort estimation is
usually based on approximate headcount
or timesheets and CRM type applications. These measures are highly inaccurate. Headcount and elapsed time does not measure real Effort – it hides the complexities related to multiple projects, under-utilization of time and over-work. Employees filling in timesheets - whether on spreadsheets or CRM type applications, find it a painful chore. Their inputs tend to be highly inaccurate and very subjective. There is a natural tendency to report only what is expected of them by their manager.
Besides the poor quality of Effort data, existing methods lack the capability to provide deeper insights into the nature of the Effort (split by activities, applications, functions, projects, tasks etc.). Incomplete and flawed data only leads to poor decisions.
A solution to measure and analyze Enterprise Effort and Time Productivity – effortlessly!
Sapience provides an elegant and solution to measure Effort. It automatically sources actual Effort for each individual employee in terms of time spent on applications and activities, mapped to desired objectives (purposes). This is then aggregated upwards as per team, project, division and location within the enterprise. An instant view of all Effort, current till the previous day, is available online to managers and employees at all levels.
Sapience lets you define your organization structure, and personalize activities and purpose that you wish to track.
Sapience arms employees with knowledge about their own time utilization. It tells them about exact time spent on projects, corporate and personal work. They get its breakup by meaningful activities such as design time, meetings, calls, and online app usage. This awareness helps employees improve their own efficiency.
Sapience supports extensive analytics. First line managers get all-round visibility into their team's progress in terms of exact Effort on actual activities and purposes. They get time productivity, application usage, on-desktop versus offline time distribution etc. Its reports give managers the basis to perform root cause analysis into delays and quality issues by trending activities and actual effort. CxOs and VPs can get precise insights into effort expended on revenue earning work versus others and detailed breakup by projects, functions, initiatives and locations.
Sapience does not compete with Project Management (PM) software, and in fact augments it by providing actual Effort on projects and functions, along with exact time spent on activities and applications. Our OpenSapience API provides a path to integrate this with your PM tool, as well as other Finance, HR, Engineering, facilities management, and application license management software. This leads to improved reporting on costs, revenue, quality, people capabilities, facilities and software usage etc.
