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You’ve done your due diligence, and you may be fully convinced that a new tool is the right fit for your company. But of course, the first question you’ll get when presenting the solution to the individual who makes technology decisions is, “What is the expected ROI on the software?”
And rightfully so! When spending time and money on a new software solution, it makes sense to want to learn how to measure the return on investment. Thankfully, at Comprose, we’ve done the research and found the benefits of implementing our policy and procedure software so that you don’t have to.
Keep reading to learn more about what Zavanta, our policy and procedure software, is and how to determine the ROI through work time cost savings and business results.
What is Zavanta P&P Software?
P&P software, short for policy and procedure software, is a type of software designed to help organizations create, manage, distribute, implement, and ensure compliance with their internal policies and procedures.
In our early years, organizations hired us to develop their policies and procedures. We became recognized experts in this field. However, we experienced some of the same challenges you may be experiencing now: how do we control the quality of the content? streamline reviews? keep everything updated? We invented specialized software Zavanta to solve these problems and systematize policy and procedure best practices.
What started as a solution for our use was quickly adopted by organizations for their own use. Over the last 30 years working with all types of organizations, we’ve continually enhanced the technology and deepened our expertise.
It’s this expertise, productized in a software solution, that is our key competitive advantage.
Zavanta is cloud-based software that standardizes operating procedures, policies, and best practices.
Unlike traditional approaches, Zavanta is an end-to-end solution that streamlines all the work tasks and ensures that policies and procedures are accurate and accessible to all employees anytime, anyplace, and in any language. When you implement our solution, costs go down, employee confidence goes up, and compliance is enforced.
Zavanta’s Software ROI
Zavanta policy and procedure software delivers exceptional return on investment. There are numerous “soft” benefits: less frustration and streamlined communication, but it’s best to link your ROI analysis to measurable economic value.
Zavanta helps organizations achieve software ROI through these three primary key performance indicators:
- Work time cost savings: The time employees are spending authoring, reviewing, publishing, translating, updating, and managing content is reduced. Our clients have reported up to a 60% decrease just in content creation and review time.
- Increased utilization: Employees use and follow policies and procedures. They are empowered, more confident. Management can verify use.
- Business impact: The organization achieves its desired operational outcomes - risk reduction, compliance, and performance improvements.
Work Time Cost Savings
By implementing Zavanta, you can reduce the time employees are spending authoring, reviewing, publishing, translating, updating, and managing content. This is done through streamlined document management and a user-friendly interface and training.
Everyone benefits: authors, reviewers (many of whom are managers), and employees. There is little involvement needed from IT. Key employees spend less time on manual, clerical tasks.
Below is an example of the time savings you would realize in comparing Zavanta with MS Word + SharePoint/document management. The input we used in the ROI calculation is based on industry standards as well as our own experience and some stats we’ve collected over the years from our clients.
Annual Zavanta Work Time Savings
# employees needing access to content 500
# searches / day / employee 1
# new documents created / yr. 100
# documents updated / yr. 50
Hours saved using Zavanta: 3,783
The dollars saved are significant when you multiply those hours by your average loaded hourly salary for managers, IT, and employees. And that’s your year-over-year dollar savings.
The ROI for Zavanta is even more compelling once you add in the soft costs and business outcomes (compliance, lower costs, etc.).
Structured content is Zavanta’s secret sauce
Policies and procedures have unique characteristics: high volume, fast changes, diverse audiences. People use them to make decisions and perform their jobs. Uniformity is a must-have. Revisiting our own experience, we knew that a traditional document approach wasn’t going to work, especially at scale. This is why we implemented a structured content approach.
Structured content is information that is broken up into small, logical units or “chunks.” By contrast, unstructured content is freeform text that lives in a traditional document like MS Word.
A structured content solution for policies and procedures plays a crucial role in solving organizational problems.
- Everything is easier. It’s easier to create, review, translate, repurpose, track, control, and update hundreds or thousands of policies and procedures. Zavanta reduces the work time and burden on your team at every single point in the process, especially ongoing maintenance.
- Quality controls are enforced, solving an age-old problem: the waste and exposure organizations face when no one uses policies and procedures. Structured content is easier to understand and remember. Employees have a single source of truth they can trust.
- Structured content is easier to find, solving another common problem: the time employees waste looking for information. The content within documents is dispensed in small, easy-to-consume pieces, in the order users need it. Users don’t have to scroll though pages and pages of text.
Ryan Protasi, Operations and Security Manager at client Morey’s Piers, shares, “Structured content is a game changer and time saver. It’s nice to have that backbone for the consistency of the documents.” Morey’s Piers is an amusement park with over 80 ride and attraction manuals – most include a section on seatbelts. Thanks to structured content, if there is ever a change to this section, it only needs to be updated once and Zavanta updates all manuals with that section of content. No need to manually copy and paste to 80 separate documents! Zavanta also handles the re-formatting, saving him time and frustration!
Streamlined document management
P&P software is strategically created with the purpose of streamlining the lifecycle of operational documentation within an organization. Features included in the software are designed to save the time of employees and subject matter experts (SMEs) working to create, publish, distribute, and manage policies and procedures. According to our clients, the actual results are a reported 60% decrease in content creation and review time, leading to heightened operational efficiency.
Some of the best Zavanta features that streamlines operational documentation management include:
- Creation – Zavanta’s Guided Authoring paired with its structured content model helps both novice and experienced writers create high-quality policy and procedure content for internal business processes faster. The system does the formatting and not the author, eliminating a time-consuming, clerical task.
- Review/Approval – Because the content was created using Zavanta’s Guided Authoring, policies and procedures are easier to read and understand. Zavanta’s workflow automates time consuming tasks such as notifications and provides tools to manage the entire process.
- Translation - Zavanta’s Global Translation System automates language translation and syncs all language versions within your portal. When documents change, Zavanta flags what’s changed so language experts don’t have to translate the entire document again.
- Publishing – The time to request updates and for IT to publish them is eliminated. Updates go out in minutes instead of days or weeks. With Zavanta’s single source publishing, content doesn’t have to be converted or reformatted for mobile devices.
- Maintenance - No question, this is where the biggest payoff is and where Zavanta’s structured content model really shines. Need to update a job title or department name across 500 documents? With Mass Update, you can make that change in seconds.
- Content Management – Workflows streamline repetitive tasks and decrease training time. Everything – starting with author assignments to attestation is managed in a single end-to-end system. Zavanta’s built in governance and controls are designed for organizations needing policy and procedure management at scale.
Increased Utilization
Despite their best efforts and all the resources organizations pour into policy and procedure management, far too many tell us their employees aren’t following them or using them. It’s no wonder. Who wants to scroll through pages and pages of text paragraphs?
Modern policy and procedure communication is all about giving users content in a form they can consume quickly, enhanced with media such as videos and images. Employees are following policies and procedures. Managers use tools to confirm and enforce compliance.
Policies and procedures employees want to use
Clear, concise audience-centric content leads to better decision making and performance. The risk of non-use is low. Employees trust the content, so they feel empowered and more confident.
Publishing accurate and timely content quickly and effectively and reducing the amount of duplicated content can improve user experience as relevant information is found easily and consumed effectively. One Comprose client redesigned their content to help users get answers faster, decreasing average time on the portal by 21%.
Zavanta gives employees mechanisms for asking for help, connecting to subject experts, and providing suggestions for continuous improvement. Non-technical business users can generate an engaging portal that employees can access from any device – without involving IT. Your portal can even be personalized by user group so that your policy and procedure system looks like it was designed just for them.
Easily accessible documents
As per the often-cited report by McKinsey, “employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information.” Now what if that time was reduced by even 30 minutes? 30 minutes every day for every employee within your organization – that time adds up quickly.
Zavanta makes finding documents easy, saving everyone time. Employees know where to go to find the information they need with the employee portal, which is created easily with no IT or developers necessary.
Accessible, searchable content saves employees time searching for policies and procedures. Each employee can also subscribe to specific documents and flag their favorites.
Diana Heeren, Associate Vice President for Finance at Trinity University, shares, “We frequently hear how easy it is to navigate the portal. Faculty and staff can quickly find what they need without wasting time searching.” This increase in engagement lead to user increase by 6%, sessions by 12%, and page views by 8%.
Employee attestation
Managers have the automation and tools to promote policy and procedure use and verify that employees are following them. The following are just a few examples:
- With one click, procedures can be transformed into auditable task checklists that help team members do their work according to our standard best practice, every time.
- Read verify and testing campaigns can be automated with eSignature included.
- With data analytics, managers monitor usage stats in real time and discover where employees may need help.
Business Goals and Results
When each employee follows your standardized, “best way,” costs go down, employee confidence goes up, and compliance is enforced. You can drive the performance outcomes you want (and prevent serious mishaps) if employees have clear policies, SOPs, and checklists to follow – when they need them.
It’s hard to predict exactly the operational ROI you will achieve, so we’ll share some results our customers have experienced, including enhanced compliance and risk management, increased profitability, improved quality and consistency, and scalability and flexibility.
Enhanced compliance and risk management
In many industries, regulatory compliance is vital to keep in mind and sometimes presents a significant challenge. Keeping your organization compliant with all relevant laws, policies, and regulations is an important consideration in decision-making processes. Considering the impact of a serious mishap or accident can have, this focus on risk mitigation is not surprising. By preventing the use of the wrong or unapproved assets, protecting assets from inadvertent disclosure or theft, and ensuring license compliance, you can experience a 23% reduction in legal risk (Netcentric, 2019).
Since regulations are constantly evolving, it is crucial for employees to have access to the most current policies and standard operating procedures. Plus, you must not only show that you have policies and procedures in place but also ensure that employees are following them correctly.
With Zavanta, you can save time on audits and money on prevented infractions. Jessi Gunter, Quality Manager at client Covenant Pathology Services, shares, “I felt like a ‘golden god’ after our first inspection using Zavanta. The inspection was pretty painless because I had all the answers at my fingertips.” Because of this, inspection time was reduced by 50%!
With Zavanta, compliance and risk management are integrated into everyday operations. Compliance is not siloed; it now becomes a part of daily performance and culture.
- Regulations and standards can be linked into relevant policies and procedures.
- Policies and procedures are auditable. Zavanta automates document control.
- Essential checklists ensure that employees follow the procedures and don’t skip critical steps.
- Attestation and eSignature verify usage.
Improved quality and consistency
Through policies and procedures, organizations can ensure high quality and consistent work, intangible benefits for software investments. Centralized, comprehensive documentation encourages employees to complete tasks in the most efficient and effective way possible. Uniform processes offer cost savings by minimizing errors and result in better resource allocation and management.
By encouraging best practices and your company’s “best way,” resources are optimized, and waste is reduced. This is true for our client Superior Lithographics. Jared Rounsevell, Director of Operational Excellence, shares, “There's a power to the efficiency of pulling up an online repository of documents and navigating it quickly. The power of showing our system and its controls allows us to demonstrate that we have a repeatable process. People can't make changes without proper approval. That goes a long way.”
Increased profitability
Improving your policy and procedure communication will lead to more efficient decision-making and resource savings. If done right, clear policies and procedures not only support compliance, but can also drive lower costs. Employees have everything they need to perform their jobs with precision and speed. Instead of documents that don’t get used, your policy and procedures become a valuable business asset, driving operational efficiencies.
Results we’ve heard from our customers include faster rollouts, reduced employee onboarding time, and increased customer satisfaction. One client estimated that they saved over $365K in just one small workgroup by implementing the best practice of their star performer. This doesn't even include the 75% reduction in SOP management overhead or 20%-50% reduction in IT costs (Comprose and Forrester, 2016).
Scalability and flexibility
Investing in software should make sense for your company now and for any future needs. You don’t want to take the time to set up a system that isn’t sustainable long-term. Zavanta was designed to grow with your company and expand usage within any department needing policies and procedures.
Beyond an initial ROI, your Zavanta system can continually deliver value as you expand the use of the system to more application areas and departments. Regulatory compliance may be your initial driver but don’t limit your vision to this single use case. We’ve seen clients use Zavanta for a multitude of applications including:
- IT security
- Accreditations
- New system rollouts
- Backoffice operations
- New employee training
- Maintenance checklists
- HR policies and procedures
- Corporate knowledge bases
- Customer Services (Call Center operations)
For our client Crossland Construction, using Zavanta was integral to sharing best practices between numerous offices. Lorette Maine, Crossland Way/LEED Coordinator, shares, “We call the employee Portal that Zavanta generates ‘The Crossland Way.’ All employees have access to it. It has helped us maintain our core values and standardize how things are done across nine offices.” Should they expand even further in the future, the systems are already in place to ensure a smooth transition and consistency across the board.
Zavanta’s flexibility can easily accommodate how your organization will grow and evolve. Once your system is set up, and the foundation is established, it’s easy to add on.
Implementation and Training
If you’ve ever been a part of new software implementation at your organization, then you know how painful the process can sometimes be. When choosing policy and procedure software, the implementation and ongoing support is almost as important as the software itself.
Questions we are commonly asked:
- What is your implementation process? How long will it take? Who needs to be involved?
- Can you help us with potential adoption challenges?
- How responsive is your support?
- Do we get a dedicated Customer Success consultant?
- How can we leverage policy and procedure content we already have?
The great news is – we have a process for all of this.
The team at Comprose makes the transition as painless as possible during the initial employee training and implementation. A variety of resources are available to you and your team, from training hours to a client portal for self-serve information.
Because we’ve done this for over 30 years, our team knows the ins and outs of easing adoption challenges.
When speaking of training offered by the team at Comprose, Mahlon Meier, Senior Compliance Analyst at client Colonial Savings, shares, “Comprose’s staff is tremendously talented and knowledgeable. Because Comprose has worked with so many customers in the financial sector, all their advice has been spot-on and incredibly helpful. Our Coach designed our onboarding to address our specific needs. Everyone at Comprose has been excellent at pointing out what we could do or how we could approach something.”
Improve Policy and Procedure Management with Zavanta
As you can see, Zavanta is designed to improve policy and procedure management within your organization, resulting in a positive ROI and making the cost of investment worth it for your organization.
Want to find out what the potential ROI is for your organization?
We invite you to start a conversation. Our team can help you determine what your initial investment would be and help you draft a business case. This is just part of our standard services to ensure Zavanta is the best fit for you and your team.
Contact our team today to learn more.
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