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Data Capture Productivity Increase of 200% at Hay Management Consultants

Brentford, Middlesex - 2000-09-06 - We are witnessing the ways in which the Internet is revolutionising business. What isn't obvious however is the important role that automated data capture must play in this revolution and the challenges of implementing successful data capture on the Internet. In most cases, especially in high-volume environments - the current implementations are simply insufficient.

Hay Management Consultants, the consulting arm of the Hay Group, is one of the world's largest independent management consultancies. It provides human resources advice in the areas of compensation, work evaluation, role design and performance management. One of Hay Management Consultants' most valuable services is helping client organisations improve their business processes through a greater understanding of employee perceptions. These strategic, integrated engagements combine a variety of approaches that focus on people, their work, and how they are led, motivated and developed. A multi-national company, Hay Group has 2,000 staff members in 70 offices across 34 countries. For 50 years it has helped organisations around the globe achieve their goals by addressing critical personnel issues.

The Challenge

Capturing information is critical to every organisation and is especially important to organisations such as Hay Management that need to process large volumes of information. The way organisations gather, verify, process and manage information has a direct effect on their bottom line.

For example, Hay Management identified that one of the best ways of assessing a client's critical ëpeople' issues is through surveys, which are used to perform diagnostics on individual competencies, organisational climates and management style.

A key challenge for the Hay Group was therefore to find a way to quickly and efficiently conduct large-scale diagnostic surveys for multi-national organisations. Meeting this challenge would require the surveys to be translated into several different languages and the establishment of a cost-effective, reliable way to capture documents, collect data and process information.

The Hay Group initially established diagnostic processing centres at Hay McBer in Boston, London and Melbourne, to cover multi-national organisations with locations in the three different geographical time zones. While Hay Group's customers are based in 40-50 different countries world-wide, the majority of all surveys are processed at Hay Management Consultants' UK based processing centre, since it covers the largest market - Europe.

Karen Ali, diagnostics services manager in London, comments: "As European companies expanded to become increasingly multi-national, our projects grew considerably. Whilst, in the past the largest survey we were expected to cover was 2,500 participants, we began to increasingly encounter client projects covering over 15,000 people. We soon realised that the only way to cope with high-volume projects would be via the Internet and subsequently eBusiness tools, products and services."

Selecting a Web-Enabled System for the Millennium

Hay McBer, the business arm of the Hay Group that founded the original human resources diagnostic methodology, took the initiative to establish an eBusiness strategy for the Hay Group. This decision was based on the realisation that a high percentage of the employee surveys would have to be handled from start to finish on-line. Hay McBer also determined that by initiating an eBusiness based solution, the Hay Group could benefit from the added competitive advantages of reduced fax and material costs, faster access to data and increased data accuracy.

Bruce Sevy, head of processing for Hay McBer comments: "As the Millennium approached, we realised that the only way to maintain a competitive edge would be via the adoption of eBusiness solutions. Our clients imbued in the Internet world were constantly asking us questions such as ëwhy are you guys still using paper forms?' A change to existing Hay Group practices to keep up with online developments was long overdue."

"eBusiness applications were the only option that would reduce the cycle time for conducting surveys to the absolute ëbare bone' minimum. The beauty of Internet based surveys is that they remove all the time consuming and costly tasks of printing, scanning and manually keying in information from forms."

Hay McBer, chose Cardiff Software's eForms automated information capture software, TELEform and HTML+Forms, because they were the only products available that could offer a web-enabled data and document capture solution that also automated fax-based surveys. Also, Hay McBer had direct experience with Cardiff Software's TELEform family of products, having used TELEform to capture documents, collect data and process information using traditional paper forms, scanner and fax server technology - since August 1997.

What is TELEform eForms?

Cardiff HTML+Forms works with TELEform to process paper and Web-based forms simultaneously. The core of the solution is the TELEform Internet Server, which retrieves data from HTML forms using standard e-mail protocols including POP3 and MAPI. The solution also includes an HTML export function that converts paper forms into full-featured HTML forms.

Bruce Sevy, continues: "Having successfully implemented Cardiff Software's TELEform products at Hay McBer in August 1997 and subsequently at Hay Management Consulting's processing centre in the UK, in August 1998 - we felt confident that the application of TELEform for web-enabled activities would be equally as strong."

Putting the On-line System into Practice

The implementation of the eForms information capture system represented a major commitment from the three processing centres of Boston, London and Melbourne.

Bruce Sevy comments: "The initial system implementation at Hay McBer was challenging, given the need to integrate a state of the art solution with our existing legacy systems. Implementing eForms required us to audit our own current database solutions, since eForms increases the accuracy and the data pipeline to the data analysis programmes. We needed to be sure that we could handle this additional information."

"Now that our system is established, it is evident that the challenges of the initial implementation was well worth the effort."

Dan Greenshields, Technical Analyst, Hay Management Consultants, added:

"Having inherited the same software as Hay McBer, the introduction of TELEform and HTML+Forms at our processing centre in the UK went incredibly smoothly. The support we were given from Cardiff Software was professional and well informed, and it was refreshing to deal with a supplier who had a strong grasp of our business and an insight into how to adapt it to an eBusiness environment."

Karen Ali adds: "The successful implementation of the TELEform software at Hay Management Consulting two years ago and the widespread benefits we have perceived since, certainly encouraged us to go one step further and incorporate its Web-enabled offering."

Realising the benefits of web enabled automated data capture software

With Cardiff HTML+Forms, the on-line handling of surveys at Hay Management Consultants now involves a simple five stage process:

1. The employee visits the Hay surveys website, fills in a survey on screen and presses the submit button.

2. The survey passes through Hay Management's Internet server at Philadelphia, which automatically codes the forms according to region and country.

3. The survey information is then picked up by the appropriate processing centre's TELEform internet server.

4. The survey data is evaluated and exported automatically to the Hay/McBer database without the need for any human intervention or verification.

5. Feedback reports are then generated through Hay's McBer database.

Delivering Business Benefits

This process has substantially reduced the amount of time wasted with the off-line process that involved manually entering data twice (to ensure accuracy), scanning, faxing and verification processes - not to mention the cost savings in terms of the raw materials, technology, postage/faxing and labour required.

Dan Greenshields continues: "The new process of conducting surveys on-line has brought significant improvements to the administrative process, reducing the cycle time from three weeks to as little as five days. And since the process is less open to human error, superior data accuracy of 100% is now achievable."

"Certainly, TELEform's Internet enabled surveys are a lot easier for participants to fill in, minimising the number of queries we receive during completion. Also, the surveys can be saved at any point for completion another time and we can monitor the surveys returns via the Internet."

Karen Ali, adds: "The reduced cycle time of TELEform has enabled us to take on much larger projects. Where as the largest single survey we used to take on board was about 2,500 participants we can now handle survey projects as big as 15,000 participants, as there is no practical limit. This means that potentially we can handle up to approximately 30,000 surveys per year. (The only restrictions are placed on us by the clients because they require a certain amount of people to manage the project, dependent upon size)."

"The inherent flexibility of TELEform is an added bonus. It means that we can use the same software to manage a selection of very different surveys from managerial style inventory and organisational climate surveys to competency portfolios and picture story exercises."

Future developments

At present 70% of surveys at Hay Management Consulting are conducted by fax and 30% via the Internet. However, following the success of the Web-based solution in dramatically cutting down the workload at the processing centre, this ratio is expected to be reversed by the year 2001, as the percentage of employees at client organisations with Internet access increases.

Bruce Sevy at Hay McBer is now finishing a last rework of the business processes to enable the Internet to be fully integrated. He says: "In the last two years the brakes have been placed on business growth to avoid being buried under a deluge of information. But now TELEform will enable the floodgates to be opened to enable much larger projects to be taken on board, pushing the system out to websites.

"Future plans include making every Hay Group office access to the processing of electronic surveys. This will improve the management of surveys locally for centralised global management under one instruction."

Dan Greenshields concludes: "We are really pleased with the progress we have been able to make with TELEform, and aim to continue to upgrade our data capture systems in other areas through the use of additional Cardiff software applications."

One such application is Cardiff PDF+Forms, a product co-developed with Adobe Inc., which will allow Hay Group to publish computer fillable forms in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and automatically email the resulting surveys to all participants.

About Cardiff Software Inc.

Put Information to Work - Cardiff Software (www.cardiff.com) is a leading provider of document and form-driven business process automation solutions for Global 2000 organizations. The Cardiff family of integrated software products empowers organizations to automate existing business processes using technology to capture, process and respond to strategic business information, thereby improving employee productivity, customer service and profitability. In business since 1991, Cardiff has a global distribution network reaching every continent and more than 20,000 customers worldwide spanning every industry.

For more information, contact Verity at info@verity.com or at World Wide Web site http://www.verity.com or call 408-541-1500.

Verity and the Verity logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Verity, Inc.

Media Contact:

Tim Dubes

Cardiff Software Ltd

+44 (0)20 8326 1100

info@Cardiff.com

Media Contact:

Richard Merrin/Sarah Meikle

Spreckley Pittham Ltd

+44 (0)20 7388 9988

meikle@spreckley.co.uk

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