Scenario 1:     Use of Electronic Reporting results in significant cost savings and productivity gains.

Client interest in the Electronic Reporting Product was generated due to the following:

• Monthly printing costs are high (thousands of dollars per month). These costs include paper, consumables and click charges (maintenance fees) for large capacity printers.
• Bursting, handling and manual report distribution involves 1-2 FTE's and further increases costs.
• Reports are available for use only after distribution (generally 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM). At times reports are mis-delivered or lost altogether causing delays and reprints. Hardcopy is unavailable at other times unless the user makes a special trip to the distribution area. 
• Old copies of some reports are stored in filing cabinets or via microfiche/microfilm. Often, reports must be reprinted in order to retrieve historical information. At times, this historical information cannot be reprinted. Statistics show that over 20% of all print volume is due to reprints.
• Local printers are purchased and installed in user departments. While this reduces some of the distribution issues, it also increases the departmental equipment and supplies budgets, making reporting costs more difficult to control and track across the organization. 
• The same report is printed many times so that every user who may have a need for it can get their own copy. Studies show that only a small fraction of the pages printed are actually referred to by the users.
• Examination of workflow determines that the recipient of the hardcopy report in many departments is actually an admin type user who then makes more copies of the report (using a copier) for further distribution within the department. In some cases the admin user keys in report contents to a spreadsheet package for further distribution/manipulation of the data. These activities are largely invisible to the IT staff (and upper management) but result in real cost and productivity impacts.   

The client is convinced that costs can be reduced and information be provided in a more timely fashion. They have examined COLD storage solutions but have found these options to be expensive, time consuming to implement and based on standardization in desktop equipment which is difficult to achieve.

After a comparative evaluation process the client selects the BCS Electronic Reporting Product. Within 1 month of the product selection, production users are accessing a wide variety of reports via their desktop browsers (within minutes after the program which creates the report has finished execution) and hardcopy versions of reports are no longer being printed. Reports are being automatically archived by the product and reprint activity for these reports has ceased. The client has not needed to acquire any hardware or software in order to implement the product. No desktops were upgraded or modified, no software was installed at the client locations.

Benefits Realized

The client realizes immediate and substantial cost savings and productivity gains. The client reports the following to be significant unexpected benefits:

• Report information is available at any location. A user can call up the contents of a report (even old versions) wherever they are (including at home).
• "Invisible" users of the report information (those users for whom manual copies were created) can be given access to the reports at no additional cost by simply defining them as users.
• Electronic archival of reports via the product also eliminates costs for microfilm/microfiche and storage.
• The indexing technique used by the product allows information to be grouped and retrieved using whatever field the users need (instead of manually flipping thru the pages of a hardcopy report).
• Implementation of the product caused users to begin thinking about what else they could do to improve their workflow, lower costs and increase productivity.