Have you ever counted how many times you copy-paste things at work? Or how about the amount of time you spend logging in and switching between different business apps?
At ProcessMaker, we’re passionate about helping enterprise businesses remove, simplify, or automate dull and repetitive workflows. Our software solution, ProcessMaker Process Intelligence (PI), anonymously and scalably measures workflows, processes, and system activity across a business unit or organization. This also makes us an expert in measuring copy-paste talent waste.
Let’s be clear: ProcessMaker PI is not an employee tracking tool. We segregate data from users before it even leaves your workstation or laptop. We only track data objects within business apps, so we don’t see or care how much time you spend listening to Spotify during work hours. Our end goal is to help teams and enterprise organizations get more efficient and save smart people from unproductive work.
We all have different types of activities at work. Some are effective and productive, while others are repetitive and manual. None of us are productive 100% of the time, and most teams will have a balance between different types of activities.
On a high level, process intelligence can help you analyze and identify different types of work happening within your team, such as:
- Quick processing – repetitive, routine, and fast work, e.g., approving invoices.
- Focused work – deep work within a business app, e.g., creating a monthly report in Excel or Power BI.
- Multi-step workflows – workflows that cause you to jump off business applications to fetch or copy data or information before proceeding with your desired process. For example, switching between your CRM and finance solutions to create and review purchase orders and invoices.
That’s cool, but that’s probably not why you’re here. You really want to hear some surprising stats about everyday work in a large organization, like the finance department of a global enterprise. Here are some benchmarks we’ve gathered from our opt-in pilot customers over a period of 30 days.
The average 20-person enterprise operations team logs:
- over 21,000 copy-paste activities per week,
- over 1 million copy-paste activities each year.
In an average week, a 20-person enterprise operations team spends:
- 60 hours on repetitive reporting and analysis in Excel,
- 53 hours in email and team meetings. E.g., Outlook,
- 33 hours searching and organizing files, e.g., Sharepoint,
- 30 hours of copy-pasting or manually entering data into business apps, e.g., SAP FI.
As a percentage of a 20-person enterprise operations team’s work time:
- 10% of effective work time is spent in manual data entry into business applications,
- Over 50% of work time is spent creating or updating documents, e.g., PDFs, spreadsheets, and Word documents.
Do you have a copy-paste problem?
These benchmarks simply show you averages in enterprise operations but not necessarily the health or maturity of your organization. Even companies with mature, intelligent automation programs can spot opportunities for improvement through automated process intelligence. Operational excellence is a journey, and we all have our own paths to take.
With ProcessMaker, you can track and improve your digitalization rate to see the progress you make moving from desktop documents to cloud-based applications. You can also measure the three different types of work to see how your team’s productivity changes over time as you identify and implement better processes and work methods.
