How much could an enterprise save by implementing a SIP-based Unified Communications system? How about tens of millions of dollars? Sound enticing?
That kind of savings is not only possible, but likely, according to a new Webtorials paper titled Enterprises Stand to Recoup Millions Using UC. The same people behind this paper did a similar report a year ago, but where the original report focused on smaller businesses and projected savings for enterprises based on that, this one is targeted strictly at larger enterprises.
We wrote about the original report here if you’re interested. But keeping our focus on this latest, enterprise-centric analysis, let’s look briefly at what this report has to tell us.
Based on a survey of companies with more than 500 employees (their median for survey respondents was 8,700 employees), the report insists that a company with 5,000 knowledge worker employees could save $61 million a year with a SIP-based UC system, and one at the median, with 8,700 knowledge workers, could save $107 million a year.
How did they arrive at these figures? Well, the report maintains that the typical knowledge worker in an enterprise spends as much as five hours a day in unproductive tasks. By that, they don’t mean checking Facebook or sending out or monitoring Tweets. They’re talking about time spent trying to contact customers, partners, or colleagues, trying to track down needed information, or trying to schedule internal meetings or other contacts, for example.
Their calculation for the estimated time being “less than fully productive” is a bit over five hours a day. Then they go on to figure how much time could be saved out of that through extensive use of UC tools. They say 23 percent, which works out to 1.2 hours a day, six hours a week, or about 288 hours a year (based on 48 full work weeks).
From there, they did the math in terms of average salaries and other data, and came up with their savings figures.
I don’t know about your company and its people, but that calculation of five less-than-productive hours a day based on the cited tasks seems a bit high. Do people really spend nearly an hour and a half every day just “trying to find key business information?” Not finding it, necessarily, just “trying” to find it? That’s almost one workday a week spent in a futile effort to track down what you need. Sounds awfully frustrating.
So let’s be more conservative, and say maybe the total time is three “less than productive” hours a day. That reduces the eventual savings by some 40 percent, but you know what? If your 5,000-knowledge-worker company can still save $37 million a year, that’s pretty good.
It’s not like you are going to say, “Well, we can’t save $61 million so we won’t do it.” We’d say $37 million is darned impressive. OK, maybe not if you’re Mark Zuckerberg or the federal government, but for the rest of us, that kind of money is quite enticing.
And even though we may quibble a bit over the calculations, we’re 100 percent behind the final point made in this report. That is, that enterprises are losing a lot of productivity due to not availing themselves of currently available, interoperable UC tools. With these tools, a lot of time-consuming tasks would be automated or streamlined, expediting communications … and saving some big money.
