How much does your findability solution really cost? It is obvious that in today’s economy it is more important than ever to make every dollar count. Then why are so many companies sitting back, ignoring one of the largest wastes of man-hours in many companies?
On average, employees spend 9.5 work hours a week just searching for pre-existing information. What’s worse is that 6 hours a week are spent recreating documents that exist, but cannot be found. When thinking about the average hourly cost of your employees and colleagues, how much do you think this search time is costing your company, or even your department? With this information combined with the statistic that users are typically successful with their searches only about 40% of the time, the cost of a poor search solution can quickly compound to quite a large burden on a company of any size.
With the abundance of solutions available, why is it then that so many companies don’t look to enhance their ECM or search solution until there is disposable revenue? 71% of companies are unhappy with their search functionality, but as everyone is downsizing and trying to maximize the performance of each employee, we overlook one of the largest drains on efficiency. Has the world become numbed by Lord Google, the evil dictator that forces you to alter queries 10 times before finding the right site? Is it that executives don’t know there is a solution, or that SharePoint administrators aren’t being proactive in finding a third party fix with fear of pitching something with a price tag?
Depending on the solution, the price tag should not be the hindrance. Applying the statistics cited above, an employee paid £75,000 a year on a 40 hour work week and 50 weeks a year (2000 hours). Based on this, the employee earns £37.50/hour before benefits. The cost per week to find information is £337.50/week (£16,875 annual) and the cost to recreate information is £225.00/week (£11,250 annual). This being said, the cost per employee at this rate would be £28,125/year for a poor findability and search solution.
In a different scenario, let’s use 500 employees earning $20 per hour, with just one hour loss user/ month. In just three months that is $30,000 in wasted wages. That is an extra employee in many companies. In addition, that is more than the cost of Ontolica for two production servers, one development server, and a year of support. In this scenario an Ontolica search solution pays for itself in just 3 months of use.
So how much does your findability solution really cost? Are your colleagues spending hours a week looking for documents? Does your company have a plan to implement a better search solution? If not, maybe it is time to do some research and be the proactive team member that saves your company tens of thousands.
The included statistics are from:
The Hidden Cost of Information Work, IDC
Findability and the Market, AIIM