Communication and Collaboration Technology Solutions

Business Challenge

Imagine the pressure to coordinate projects when customers, manufacturers, and suppliers are located in different locations and time zones. Often project teams are unable to easily share information on critical process and results. Efforts to develop competitive proposals using talented consultants and engineers require extensive travel, unnecessary mailing and reproduction costs, and time consuming document reviews.

Engineering groups are often frustrated by the availability of specialists, incompatible drawing software, different versions of drawings, and lack of widely accepted standards. Even when fully staffed the configuration often must be changed late in cycle as a result of changes in customer requirements.

Sales managers often find it difficult to coordinate engineering and manufacturing efforts with sales opportunities while traveling to customer sites. Capitalizing on opportunities when they occur is as critical as offering realistic delivery dates and product performance criteria.

Managers who need accurate information to make decisions and to inform investors on program status find it difficult to obtain up to date performance information about the portfolio of projects that are critical to the company. Gathering financial, resource, marketing, and technical information is a continual challenge.

To meet its business objectives and maintain competitive advantage, companies have recognized the need for a cost effective secure solution that would allow its distributed teams to work together as if they were located in one office. They also need a way to coordinate resources and financial support and to track the status of all projects within an area of responsibility. Finally, investors and customers often share project information as the projects evolve and real time communication with them is vital.

Organizations operate in many forms today but many times teams work in geographically dispersed sites and draw on resources from different parts of the organization. Often they rely on a central web site for coordination. An alternative to this centralized structure is the peer to peer approach where the team environment is spread among various personal computers, tablet computers, and laptops.

Typical Company Situation

Activities in a typical office often occur around a small conference table covered with charts, overhead projector, drawings and/or models. Nearby there is a large collection of reference material available for rapid searches. If any of the team wishes, they can break away from the discussion and visit their private desks to work individually. This scene neatly describes the challenge of remote collaborative effort. What if the distances between participants were not just across the table but across the nation? What if it were not possible for the participants to meet at the same time? What if the reference material, sales data, financial reports, market data, drawings, and /or models were not close at hand but were distributed across the globe? How can we make an office work effectively under these conditions?

Early attempts to solve this problem using electronic telecommunication were crude and even though the results were dramatic they were fraught with numerous technical problems. Today new technologies have been developed that resolve a number of these problems and the challenge today is to use collaboration technology more effectively.

Today there is a cost effective and unique platform that offers the tools and connectivity to improve collaboration among small and medium size companies and it allows you to use your existing office software. This platform extends file sharing among users on an internal network to a virtual network across the Internet and through firewalls in a secure and transparent manner. Team members can be invited to join a workspace as easily as sending an email. Once the team is sharing a workspace additional tools can be added to improve their day to day work operation.

The return on investment for improved collaboration technology can be significant for a very small investment. Assuming a project team of ten employees for three years in periodic communication for technical exchanges, weekly status meetings, and monthly review meetings, and the effective reduction in cost of collaboration is 10%; the cost savings represents an average return on investment of 40% to 90%. Payback is often less than 8 months.

Typical benefits include:

Efficient aggregation of specialized expertise
Reduces friction of distance communication
Accelerates time to market
Encourages innovation through real time collaboration
Engages customer in product development process
Avoids large organizational and infrastructure expense
Reduces product and overhead costs
Increases engineering and administrative productivity

Contact Computer Solutions of Tennessee today to see how we can help your business communicate more effectively.

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