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Sapience is a patent-pending software solution that provides delivers 15-20% gain in work output from the existing team. It does this without requiring any change in process or additional management effort. |
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This has a transformational impact on revenue, profitability and delivery capability. Sapience achieves this by providing highly automated work visibility, leading to greater people engagement, improved work focus and effort optimization. |
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Sapience delivers 15-20% gain in work output. This leads to significant increase in revenue, profitability and/or delivery capability based on the nature of your business. Client retention, quality of deliverables, and employee work-life balance, also improve. Here's how. |
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The following recent trends are making it imperative to measure exact Effort at companies whose employees rely on computers to deliver their products and services: |
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With more work being outsourced, clients are demanding accountability and assurance of time spent on their projects. On Time & Material contracts, clients are demanding performance guarantees on delivery schedules, and documentation to validate the person-hours of effort. Manual timesheets may not meet increasingly stringent audit requirements. |
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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. |
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In product companies, time to market can make the difference between success and failure, making it critical to be able to accurately estimate completion timelines. |
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Over 50% of cost is in employee compensation, yet there is no simple way to verify that employee Effort capacity is being fully utilized. Anecdotal evidence is that over 50% of project teams are significantly over-worked for long stretches. At the same time, it is estimated that 20% of employees may be working at 50-60% capacity or less, often because they are not assigned sufficient tasks. |
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Business Results follow from combined Effort. Effort that is not aligned, inadequate, and wasteful, results in delayed and poor quality Results. This impacts client relationships, and eventually the business. Enterprises invest in tracking Results, but Effort is only a guess (at best). The challenge is exacerbated in today’s work environment of flexi hours, telecommuting, and outsourcing |
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Sapience gives you extensive analytics on Effort at all levels. 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. |
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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. |
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At project and company level, Efforts (in person-months) is the sum total of everyone’s Time on various projects, functions, and initiatives.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. |
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In summary, Sapience boosts 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. |
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Sapience determines which applications are being used by each employee on his/her desktop, and for how long. These time slots are mapped to the activities and purpose that an organization wishes to track. Offline time is similarly captured and assigned. |
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Sapience uses learning and rules based intelligence, to increasingly automate these time allocations. |
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However, the real goal of Sapience is not what each person did every day. Instead, it is about high level trends that managers can use to fine-tune collective effort. Sapience aggregates the per-employee information at team, project, business unit and company level. The product’s analytics and trend engine then generates actionable trends that help senior management to optimize business efficiency, and individual and teams to improve their own work output. |
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Sapience is not Project Management (PM) software. In fact, it can augment your existing PM process, by supplying reliable data on exact Effort spent on projects and functions, along with details of activity-mix towards meeting the deliverables. |
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With the OpenSapience Application Programming Interface (API), the Effort and Activity-Time information can be sourced programmatically for integration into PM and other third party applications. |
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Current Effort estimation methods based on approximate headcount and calendar time, or timesheets and CRM type applications are highly flawed. Bad data can only result in poor decisions. |
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In the headcount approach, consider this example. There are three different project teams which spent 10 person-months each to complete the work. One of them had team members working 50-60 hours average per person each week due to tight deadlines and under-estimation of effort, the second was under-loaded and averaged only 30-35 hours per person-week on the project, while the third spent 40 hours per person-week but 15-20% of that was towards maintenance of an older release. Such underlying differences can cause a variance of 20-100% between calendar estimate and the real Effort. |
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Most companies now require employees to fill in timesheets – either on spreadsheets or CRM applications. Employee 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. Employees also find this a painful chore, especially since over time, the inputs demanded become exceedingly detailed. Users filling in timesheets, especially on weekly basis, cannot be expected to remember exact time-wise breakup on activities and projects. |
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Sapience automates almost the entire process, and makes it very accurate. Besides timesheet, it delivers aggregate Effort at every level of the company. This is even more valuable from an operational perspective to improve work output and efficiency. It is what companies really need. |
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Sapience is able to handle all these cases. By using the user's login ID, it merges data for the user even if s/he is using multiple PCs, either concurrently or at different times. It distinguishes between different users on the same desktop. Sapience also has the ability to merge time spent on common servers connected using Microsoft RDC and Citrix. |
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Sapience is priced on per-user basis. The per-user license fee is equivalent to a few days of average per-employee cost to company.Sapience has been shown to generate 15% more work output within the first 30-45 days. Return on Investment is within a few months. |
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Most of the gain comes from self-improvement at team levels, but much more is possible if managers utilize trends to improve Work Focus and Capacity Utilization. |
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Sapience is not a monitoring tool. It has been designed to keep in mind the requirements of enterprises, who are interested in actionable high level work trends, and not data about individual's time. |
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Employee level |
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Each employee has multiple controls to ensure that only work related summary time information is made available to the organization. Specifically: |
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Employees get detailed information about their Time Utilization on applications, activities, files and web links accessed. This is marked as being ‘Private’ by default, unless it was explicitly identified as being work related previously by the employee or through rules set for business apps. While the employee gets very detailed time breakdown to ensure proper mapping to activity and purpose, the company gets only totals of time on applications and activities which were marked to work. |
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Employees have the guarantee that activities and files/web links that are marked as ‘Private’ will not be visible to the organization. |
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Employees are further guaranteed that the exact minute by minute work being done by the employee is not visible to the organization. |
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As a further capability, employees have a Start/Stop option to disable the Time Utilization sourcing on their desktop at any time. This stops capture of time utilization data. |
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Employees can view their own trends on the server. Hence, there is complete transparency because this is exactly, and the only, data that will be seen by their managers. |
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Organization level |
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At organization level, the Time Utilization data for each employee is aggregated at a central server. Only totals of work related time spent on Applications and Activities is available, and not the breakup by hour or minute. There is no visibility into data related to ‘Persoanl’ time of any employee. |
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On the central server, the aggregate data is mapped to the organization hierarchy, and made available to employees and managers. Each person can view trends and reports based on his/her position in the company, and based on permissions set on the Sapience Server. Everyone gets a view for his/her own data and ‘downwards’ into organization entities that report to the person. It is not possible to see any trends or reports for peers, peer teams, and higher level entities. Individual level data for employees reporting to a manager may also not be available, if that is the policy decided by the company. |
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Organizations are very different, and should have the flexibility to decide their strategy regarding Effort Visibility. Sapience provides various configurable settings that enable a company to decide its model, as described below. |
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By setting various flags in the product, an organization can adopt different Effort Visibility strategies. Three typical examples are described below: |
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Effort Visibility Strategy |
Individual Data Visibility |
Implications |
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Anonymous Mode |
None |
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Managers can analyze and optimize 'Effort' at team level and above, but cannot view individual data |
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Individuals can use it as a self-productvity tool since it effectively hold up a mirror to their work. At the same time they feel secure that their data is not visible to others |
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Project Transparency |
Till Project Manager |
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Project Manager (PM) and team leads can view the individual’s data (excluding data marked as ‘Private’) |
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Senior managers above the PM can view project and team data, but have no access to individual data |
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Data can be blocked for select individuals. Similarly, only some managers may be allowed Individual data access. |
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High Security requirement |
All levels |
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Individual data is available to all managers in the hierarchy |
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Access to all data is available to authorized audit staff for any security related review |
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The first strategy (‘Anonymous Mode’) is appropriate for companies that are averse to any visibility into individual level data, and only want to get trends at team level and higher. Individuals can still track and improve their own 'Time Productivity', while the organization focuses on optimizing 'Effort' at team level and above. |
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The second strategy (‘Project Transparency’) is based on the premise that selected managers should have access to work-related information about inidviduals. This enables pro-active assistance and support on fine-tuning their effort as required. Employees have the assurance that their personal time is not visible to managers. They can even turn off the Agent when doing personal work. Individual data of people above a certain designation can also be blocked if that is the desired policy. |
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The last policy (‘High Security requirement’) is required at organizations where information security is a major concern, such as in defense or finance companies. Effort and Time data are made available to all levels of managers. During security audits, authorized staff can also view information for any individual. Employees at such companies are subject to many such security requirements, and accept its necessity given the nature of their work. |
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Sapience can be deployed within half a day at companies with less than 500 employees. At larger companies, once the organization structure is made available, along with user domain ids, deployment can be automated with the Sapience Personal Client being pushed to individual PCs. |
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Sapience is easily configured to your enterprise. The core functionality is to collect and map Effort and Time Utilization to Activities and Purposes. You can decide the names of Activities that need to be tracked. Besides standard ones like Communication, Meetings, Calls, Documentation etc., you may have specific ones like Requirements, Design, Development, Testing, Support etc. There may be corporate activities that you wish to track like Training, Hiring and Appraisals |
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The Purpose list requires no editing. If an individual is part of a project, Sapience automatically assigns it as a Purpose. Some employees may be assigned to multiple purposes. There is one fixed purpose - ‘Private’ - that is for any personal time. |
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Sapience can directly boost revenue and profitability, which makes it a powerful application for your enterprise. It does not compete with any existing Project Management (PM) software.It does not compete with Project Management (PM) software, and in fact augments it by providing actual Effort on projects and functions, along with insights into work patterns. |
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With its Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and OpenSapience API, it enables existing third party applications, or your own web based applications, to access its internal database directly. Hence Sapience data, analytics and reports can be imported into your current applications. |
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Our OpenSapience API enables any third party application to be integrated with Sapience. This can be done by your IT team, or by the InnovizeTech professional services team. |
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