Name: The hidden cost of document work
Uploaded: 2025-08-28T10:04:10.454Z
Duration: 47 min 8 s
Description: The hidden cost of document work

Transcript for "The hidden cost of document work": Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Templafy Talks. I'm your host as always, Jonathan Ekos, senior principal customer success manager here at Templafy, and we've been on a bit of a break preparing the program for the rest of the year. No spoilers just yet. Stay on our socials to find out more, but we've got lots of Templafy Talks content coming up with you to the end of the year. Today, we have a very interesting topic for you. Now we wanna ask some questions. Firstly, if your team has spent fifty thousand hours on documents, how many of those hours actually drive value? How much do you think your organization spends each week? How much time do you think they spend just searching for the right content or for templates? Do you know how long it actually takes to create proposals, audit reports, contracts from start to finish? Most leaders, yes. Few actually track this. And how do you currently justify investments in productivity and automation if you're not tracking time? This episode of Templafy Talks is called the hidden cost of document work. And I'm not alone, you'll be happy to hear. My guest today is returning to Templafy Talks, last appearing in December 2024. He's a chartered accountant and former director of innovation and change from BDO Canada. He's currently the global head of strategy of industry strategy at Templafy. Please welcome back Paul Vitrano. Hello, Paul. Thank you, John. Looking forward to today's talk. It's obvious, Paul, you're not sitting next to me. Where are we where are you dialing in from today? Yes. That's very good. I wish I was in the Copenhagen office today, but right now, I'm dialing in from Toronto, Canada. Ah, fantastic. Well, as you're dialing in from Toronto, Canada, it'll be really, exciting for you folks at home to test the chat. Let us know where you're dialing in from. As Paul mentioned, I'm from Copenhagen. Paul's in, Canada. Where are you? So it gives us a good excuse to test the chat. Fantastic. So what we're gonna do over the course of, the next thirty minutes or so is try and uncover the real understanding behind the document work that goes on and how we can manage, you know, track some of that time, and then turn that into value for your organization. There are certain ways that we do this at Templafy, and you'll have, no spoilers to know that that's why Paul is here from BDO. It's something that he's done in his previous life. Previous role, maybe not previous life. And, so I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna share some slides and give you some examples. There'll be a video in there, and there'll be some conversation between me and Paul. At the end of this, you'll be able to get in touch with us, and we can do some calculations with you another time and then help you justify, the return on investment, with you later on. So exciting times lay ahead. But let's jump in to our presentation, for today. So Tableau five talks, as we've said I just need to pop open my screen here. Is one second. Here we go. The hidden cost of document work is the theme of today. Now the cost of poor content and data quality to enterprise organization is vast, and so we've got some sources and some statistics here. This first one, Paul, $12,000,000, is the amount that enterprises lose annually due to poor content and data quality. From your previous times in, when you worked with BDO, what do you tell what can this what can you tell me about this? They might be surprised to see that $12,900,000 because it's really hard to kind of trace that back to the profit and the loss statement. But that is sort of the true value of what firms can expect to lose when they're not able to keep compliant documents within their workflows. It shows up in many different areas. So if you don't have library or best practices of content that people are supposed to be using, if you don't have any way to kind of enforce some of the content or branding guidelines that people are supposed to be able to use, if you don't have sort of a review process, or if you don't have technology that helps you to kind of enforce some of those brand guidelines, some of the some of the legal requirements that are required within documents. All of these things start to add up, and it shows up in many different ways. It can show up in having, you know, decreased efficiency in terms of completing documents. It can show up in other ways, like, possibly in potential litigation. It could show up just with teams that are spending more time editing documents, and not spending time on where they should be focusing on, which is actually driving revenue for companies, or focusing on the work that they're supposed to be doing. So all these things kind of add up, and that's that's where we end up seeing with a lot of customers. And and in my previous life where we saw that if you don't have those systems in place, you know, these efficiencies really do start to pile up. Okay. So, yeah, the next statistic we're looking at, 2.7 times more likely, to incur risk through compliance. Obviously, Templafy, is one of many organizations that make sure that compliance is essential and you follow the right procedures in documents. But, Paul, two point times more likely, like, it's almost three times more likely to create an error if you don't have a tool in place. That seems kind of astounding, really. Well, it it it definitely adds up. I mean, if you're, you know, if you think about it, when somebody's trying to create a document and they need to make sure it's legally compliant, they've gotta find the right content. They've gotta find the right template. And depending what industry you're in, that can be widely complex. I mean, you could have different jurisdictional requirements, like within The United States. You know, different states have different laws. If you're working in the European Union, there's other privacy laws and other considerations that you have to take into account. So depending on how complex your business is, there could be different variations of these different agreements that you have to account for. Then you kind of add on where you have to have a manager or somebody superior that's reviewing those documents to make sure that it's compliant. And usually, that review process is required because there aren't really good enough processes or technology in place to make sure that the document is completed right the first time. So you end up with a lot of this sort of back and forth, you know, making sure that the document is correct. Once it goes to a client or customer, they're gonna go through it as well too and check to make sure that it's compliant as well. And, you know, they're oftentimes more often than people care to admit, you're gonna run into some of these basic errors that shouldn't have occurred in the first place. And it's because there's a lot of complexity with when it comes to some of these documents. So having something in place to kind of help enforce this, with a combination of best practices and using technology as well too can really go a long way to kind of minimize minimize a lot of that back and forth and mitigate a lot of the risk that companies might experience. Yeah. Exactly. So we looked at content and data quality. Now from a time saving perspective, this one kind of jumped out to me, obviously, like you. Paul, obviously, we work with documents every day. The ECM consultant team, they've in their study, they worked out that 50% of knowledge workers' time is spent on document tasks, which I find astounding. And almost the same, Microsoft did a survey and 62% of their respondents say they struggle with time searching for information in their workday. And across the Microsoft three six five applications, the average employee spends around 57% of their time in communication, I. E. Meetings, emails, chat, and 43 in creating documents, presentations, or spreadsheets. Now that is an incredible amount of time. Just that we ponder the question at the start, like, if you're using fifty thousand hours, on average as a in document creation, how many of those hours actually drive value? Forty three percent of your time, how much of that is actually value driving time? It's, definitely something to consider. Yeah. Absolutely, John. And as you noted, and I'm sure that you're hearing it from customers as well too, you know, there's lots of advancements with artificial intelligence that people think are gonna make employees more efficient. But the at the end of the day, when you're when you're dealing with knowledge work, there's a ton of time that's spent being, you know, focused on creating documents. And as you saw with the statistics there, half of your day is spent working on it. So, you know, even though there's a lot of great technology that's coming out that make people more productive and more efficient, at the end of the day, documents drive business. And, you know, if there if companies aren't focusing on that to kind of find ways to improve or streamline the processes around document work, you're not really gonna get a lot of the efficiencies. Or if you do, you're gonna hit a ceiling at some point. Yep. Exactly. And I think that's an interesting, segue, obviously, to talk about your previous life. You recently worked with, I think it was your old boss, to come up with some statistics. Now a 120,000 documents generated through Templafy last year. So, you know, those hours, that is extremely a large amount of documents. How many consultants? How many people were you at BDO Canada in this, when you last year when you did this? Yeah. When I when I was last at BDO, it was about 5,000, professionals, including partners, when I was at BDO. So if you, extrapolate that across a 120,000 documents, I mean, that's a lot of documents that are being produced. And do you remember, off the top of your head, putting you on the spot, do you remember what the, the time saving like, the value was of that time saved to the, to the business? Yeah. As a matter of fact, John, we actually we have a case study on our website that actually, accumulates that value. Now this is in Canadian dollars, but in terms of value saved, $1,650,000 a year in time savings. And like I said, that really adds up with all these different little things of, you know, implementing a system like Templafy, make sure that teams don't have to struggle to find content. There's rules based automation, the technology within the platform that make sure that you're using the right content, make sure that it's compliant. And then when somebody has to check that document before it goes out the door, they have confidence that the basics are already included within that document, so they only have to really focus on the more complex issues. And all of that adds up to a lot of value that's being driven even long after I've actually left BDO. And shout out to my old boss, Brian Henry, for for continuing to championing the product. If you ask him and if you ask the executive team at BDO, they continue to see value from Templafy. Fantastic. And And it's funny, right, we talked at the start and I pondered the question. You know, do you know how much time in an organization it takes to create a proposal or an audit letter, you know, those kind of reports? You you your teams did. Right? You tracked your time. Mhmm. And it's very interesting. So can you, maybe elaborate a little bit more about how you got to that one six five? And, obviously, no spoilers for the, the case study. We do want folks to go to the website and take a look, but it'd be interesting for you to share some of that with us today. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, with in the industry, with professional services and accounting, I think for for any of the consultants that are listening on today's call, you know very well, you have to track every hour and every minute of your day. So there's a lot of systems that are put in place that actually track the amount of time that people are spent on client work and administrative work and, you know, all the way all the way down to education, I mean, in terms of what people are doing day to day. So we had sort of that added benefit of being able to kind of track some of this time. And so then people are able to kind of estimate how much time they're able to save one when Templafy was implemented at BDO. But if you're working for a company where you don't necessarily have that data that's available, you are able to do a few other things to try and track that. So one of the things that we did to kind of track how much time people are spending on things like proposals, like contracts, like engagement letters, is this really kinda give an estimate. So we use the survey, to estimate how much time people are spending. The key thing that you wanna do is you wanna measure it by staff level. Because Mhmm. A junior person might spend a ton of time creating a document, but somebody higher, like a manager or a c suite executive or a partner, they're not necessarily spending as much time, or they're focusing on different things, like reviewing the document for compliance. It's key to make sure you understand how much time is being spent at each individual level because as you'll see as we get later on to the webinar, that'll help get a more accurate calculation in terms of determining what that return on investment is going to be. And then, you know, once once something like Templafy is rolled out, then you can do a post survey and, you know, ask people to estimate how much time do you think you're saving on these documents? Are you saving no time at all, or are you saving a significant amount of time? That should give you enough information to at least do an estimate. And I think one of the key things, John, that, you know, I think listeners should kind of understand is that this is part science and part, art, obviously. You know, you need to kind of do some sort of estimates here. You're not necessarily going to get it down to the exact dollar, but keeping some of these best practices that we covered today, that's gonna get you a long way in terms of really kind of wrapping your head around what kind of a return is actually being provided on your investment. Yep. Exactly. And just like you said, right, we're gonna dive into how we can help, customers measure that later and how we do that. It was interesting you talked around, this sort of the time savings. We're gonna take a look at a video now from, another customer of ours that recently, had a testimonial with us, and they track time, and obviously the amount of time documents took before and then how much time documents took with Templafy. Let's take a look at what Adobe, saved with Templafy. You know, three years ago, we created content from scratch. Now with Templafy, we click some buttons and we automate that process. It's extremely easy and straightforward. I don't know if we can really live without it anymore. I'm Jason Thayer, senior manager of our digital strategy group at Adobe. 65% of our sellers' time is spent on administrative tasks. Once we uncovered it, like, there was no turning back. It was something we absolutely had to fix. Before we had Templafy, when a rep was putting together a deck, we learned that they actually went to seven different sources typically to put together a deck. And not only seven sources, but each one of those sources, they would have to download, say, an 80 page deck, edit it, take out the pieces they wanted, go to the second source, the third source, the fourth source. So the problem we had was that reps on average were spending an hour or so to create each deck. We learned about Templafy, and after we ran the pilot, the results were actually that they saved 72% of their time building presentations. So this almost gave them, like, a month back. A month back of their time. So going over that, and, thank you to Jason for the, for the video case story there. But he mentioned at the start that 65% of their time is spent in PowerPoint building proposals, and we're given 72% of that time back, which I think is very impressive. Paul, knowing the organization the way that you do, maybe give some examples or some ideas around how they would track that kind of, usage and how and and the improvements. Yeah. It's a great question, John. And, you know, I think it's it's important to note to people that are listening today that, you know, some of this is going to be estimates. I mean, you're you're gonna have to make a bit of an educated guess in terms of how much time is being spent on this. Because, you know, depending on how complex the document is, you know, there could be a wide variation in terms of how much time you spend. I mean, when I was working on proposals and professional services, you know, very simple straightforward one, I could probably complete in about an hour or two. If I was doing a very large proposal that, you know, needed various different teams and, you know, various, you know, large scope of work, you know, that could take me several hours, even a few days to actually put together. So it's it's important to note that, you know, depending on the complexity and the variability within those documents, that's you're gonna get a different range. So in that case, it's really good to kind of understand what what kind of documents are you automating here, and how much variability are you experiencing with those different documents. So you can divide it into buckets. You know, you can do sort of a more simple, and easy to do documents, and then you can put it into a medium bucket and then sort of a higher, more complex, document. Then from there, it's like I mentioned before, is that you can use some various different tools to talk to your staff. You can use, surveys. You can do some targeted interviews to talk with some of your star performers or people that are work, very closely with these type of documents to kind of understand what's involved in that and how much work is spent. And I think, you know, Jason and the Adobe team really kind of articulated that is that they had to really kind of, like, talk to these people, really kind of investigate to kinda get the lay of the land. Because until you do that, you don't really know how what is involved in actually putting these documents together. So once you kinda do that preliminary research, then you're able to kind of stratify the different documents that you have and sort of, you know, put them into buckets and then sort of understand how much automation, how much rules based, work, how much, you know, just having a library can kind of benefit teams in terms of making it making that process more efficient. So I would usually advise people to kinda start there. And so 72%, what would be some of the traps then that they would have, fallen into in the past and that they've actually now been able to solve with Semper Fi? Yeah. It's a great question. And I think Jason highlighted sort of, like, the the crux of that issue at the beginning is that, you know, the Adobe team had to go to separate different sources just to even get started on a document. I mean, that if you put that together, it probably doesn't seem like it when you're doing it. You know, you're just kinda mindlessly clicking to probably different systems and such. But it adds up. I mean, the the fact that somebody has to go to multiple different sources to put a document together, that makes it increasingly difficult. So Yeah. I think that is definitely probably a a key trap that, you know, having, you know, different templates, different content that's scattered across different systems. That's probably a a key trap that we see a lot of customers fall into, and certainly something that I experienced as well in my previous career. Yeah. Exactly. Like, we talk around the seven sources. I mean, just knowing how, you know, organizations work, they could be digital asset managers, CRM systems, they could be looking on, you know, intranet sites for information, going into SharePoint, looking at older presentation templates, trying to find the information that can, you know, collate before they can even start to build or collate their presentation for the for the next project. So it is extreme it can be extremely time consuming. So it's amazing to see, what Adobe achieved and what you achieved with BDO along many of our customers. You probably noticed, viewers at home, that that video cut off a little early. The video is actually three, four minutes long. There's also the BDO study on our website. So if you have some time, check out the customer case stories on our website for more information. The next customer we're going to have a spotlight on, is Now Paul hit the nail on the head when he said some is science, some is art. And so what we've done with is we have, spotlighted with them how we've gotten to their return on investment figures. We quarterly basis. For this example, I've taken a year's worth of data. And, I'm gonna go through now, explain to you how we got to that number, and, share a little bit more about their story. Paul, at any point, feel free to jump in. I'll call on you for some sections. But so the return on investment, what we want to understand, and we want to prove value from Templafy. There's no, no illusion whatsoever that this improved users' lives greatly. As we've just seen from, what Adobe said, the amount of sources they need to, to complete their work has drastically changed. But so the return on investment, how we get to that is we review the numbers. Now what you're seeing on your screen at the moment on the right hand side is an estimation for each asset type. Now an exercise that we can do with you is, like Paul mentioned, proposals, they're not an asset type. They're actually maybe a presentation or a word document in this case, but that could be broken down, and you can give a time value to each asset type. So we've done that here on the the type of asset, on the content type, as opposed to document, like, someone specific, like a report audit. But we can work this out with you later on. What we see then is by doing this, we can associate a a time saving to each asset type or action with Templafy, which makes you it makes it easier for you to analyze, the return on investment and make informed strategic decisions. So I wonder if anyone can guess what kind of return on investment are getting from their Templafy subscription. Maybe some in the chat now. Let's take a look. Well, they are getting 16 times ROI in the previous year with a saving of $2,397,000. Now how do we know that? I imagine there's some eyes rolling, in the audience, and so what I wanna do now is show you how we get to that number and, and work it out with you. So please keep your quest your questions coming in the chat. But so how we do this is we know that Templafy has been used over almost 900,000 times. We then give an average hourly wage, which we agreed with them, is around $35 an hour. We know some of you, consultants at home are on way more than that. And there'll be people in the organization that are on less. So with those, valuations, we get seventy three thousand hours saved, which gives us our saving of around $2,500,000. When we remove the cost of subscription, we get to the number, the time saving number that you saw on your previous slide, which gives us our ROI. Paul, anything to add? Any comments to make on, on that process? How we get from that, from the usage to that number? I think this is a great way, John, to to kinda calculate it. I think you've sort of outlined, like, this is a really great sort of, like, templated way of of sort of measuring that ROI. And I think you've got sort of the key components, like, you know, we obviously need to understand the total cost of ownership, you know, so the technology cost and the time to get set up, and then calculating the actual return that's coming as a result of implementing Templafy and putting in some of these different changes. So, I mean, really, you've got a pretty straightforward return on investment calculation here. I think the key thing that you kind of highlighted is that you wanna make sure that you've got the right inputs. And I think some of the tools and some of the example content that Templafy has to help you make that calculation, that goes a really long way to making sure that you have as accurate of a calculation as possible. Yeah. Thank you very much, Paul. And so as like Paul said, this is the calculations what you're seeing now. You can see each asset type has been used, the amount of times that you can see on your screen. You can see the workings out. We wanna be as transparent as we can with our customers. And just like Paul mentioned, removing that total cost of ownership as well. Now, Paul, what other, consideration should customers take when it comes to costs that go into this ROI, on top of this sort of 16 and times ROI we've seen here? Yeah. And, you know, that's a really great question, John. And a lot of quite a lot of times we get that from customers to really kind of understand what is the true kind of investment that you have to make in here. So, obviously, the technology costs, you know, your template subscription should obviously be as part of this. But there's also other costs that you have to account for, like, internally that you might be spending. So some of this work that you have to set up, you know, some of the document automation within the platform, you might have teams working within your company or organization that have to spend time actually putting this together. And so you may want to include some in, you know, internal salary costs, to, you know, to account for that initial setup. And then going into the future, you need to you need to calculate how much it's gonna take to maintain that. Because once you set up the documents once, it doesn't mean you're done. You have to make sure that you have relevant content within the platform at all times. And so that can fall to one person or it could fall to several different people. And it may not necessarily be their full time job, but there is some time that is being spent by. And I think it is prudent for teams to include that as part of the calculation. They really true truly reflect, okay, here is the time, you know, the, you know, technology costs and labor costs that go into maintaining this. So make sure that when you're presenting to your executive team, you can show that you kind of accounted for all of those different pieces. Thank you. It's, it's interesting, you know, with obviously, we have a very close working relationship with them. And just like you said, most of the people that manage Templafy day to day, that's not their full time job. And so it's sometimes very difficult to get to that exact number that you mentioned. Right? How much time are they actually spending on Templafy? This calculator was designed as an estimation, you know, as each asset type the way we kind of go about it is with the core document template you can see. Let's take that as an example. It's the starting template. So how long would it take to get from a blank Microsoft Word document to the starting document? We say around five minutes will the format and need them to be done. And that's kind of how we work out with the complexity of each type. What we haven't spoken about, which I'm pretty impressed actually, we've made it sort of thirty minutes without talking about AI. But I do think I'm gonna mention it a little bit because, as you know, the AI assistant is part of every Templafy subscription, and therefore, there is no cost associated with it. So it's pure return on investment. Okay. So how we break it down, the AI insertions save around five minutes. Not only is that gonna speed up the, the writing task that the AI assistant solves for, every output coming from the AI assistant will also contain the tone of voice. In this case, ARM, recently, early twenty twenty five, rebuilt their tone of voice. So now that's an extra level of compliance. On top of that, we know that the tool was used, over 57,000 times since launch, which saves around 4,708 well, it saves 4,780 by our calculation. Now again, that's $35 an hour. That is just AI alone is a $167,000 in savings. And again, there's no subscription cost for the universal AI assistant, so that's pure ROI. Obviously, once we were set up, we can remove a bit from that. And what I think is even more important to share in this case is that they only launched, the AI assistant on Thanksgiving. So it's essentially halfway through this, time period. Paul, I think, you know, obviously, everyone out there at the moment, AI is a big buzzword. And trying to get value and a return on investment from tools like AI, I think this is, you know, a a good estimate. What what do you think? What are your thoughts from, sort of with your BDR chart account and hats on? Sorry. BTO. Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's a great way that you've kind of articulated it, John, is that AI tools, especially when it comes to generating and proofreading content, it's only gonna be as good as your prompt. And, you know, I think as AI is still kind of an emerging technology, there's still a lot of people that are trying to understand what the best practices should be when it comes to prompt engineering. And so sometimes, if you're not using a consistent prompt, it will even if you are using a consistent prompt, with some AI models, you might get a slightly different result. And that's sort of the challenge that I think you kind of highlighted is, like, you know, how do you how do you use AI to make sure that the the same tone of voice is still being used for the organization, making sure that the outputs are relatively consistent. And I think using something like the AI assistant actually make sure that when somebody's using artificial intelligence in their workflows, there's some consistency behind there. And I think that's where you kinda see that return on investment is that people are gonna be using those, AI buttons to make themselves more efficient. But because of the guardrails that we put within the platform, there's that compliance and derisking of that work that's also included in there as well too, as well as that brand compliance that you're not necessarily gonna get by just having somebody using an AI tool off the shelf and, you know, leaving them to their own devices. So I think, you know, when you're kinda calculating that, especially using the AI assistant, you really do need to keep those things in, in mind. And I think Teams, like you said, they're gonna see a ton of value from using that as well. Mhmm. That's interesting. Right? It's like it's a really good point, and it's one of those sort of softer KPIs to track. We talk we've shown a lot about, you know, how long it takes to find a document, to find a template, to insert an asset. We it's very hard to track the increased compliance. Now we always like to assume that if you use a tool like Templafy, all of the content is collated by administrators within your organization, so you're always compliant. But, you know, how does how do how do we track that? You know, it's a really good question, John, and it it is a little bit tricky because you can't really do something like, you know, track how many times you've been sued over a non compliant document. You know, you you can't really take the litigation cost and kind of calculate it that way. Well, a lot of the things that you can do to kind of calculate that is you can actually do some content audit during the year to see what documents have gone out the door and actually check to see if they've been compliant. For those that have been in the professional services world such as myself, you're very familiar with internal quality control reviews, and so that can sort of you know, some of those metrics can pop up during those reviews. But if you're not in a highly regulated industry like that, there's nothing stopping you from doing some content on yourself as well too. So keeping, you know, doing a a survey of different documents that have gone out the door that have been generated in the platform, that will allow you to kinda see, you know, if documents have been compliant or actually been used. But also, John, I think we should also highlight as well too, a lot of the dashboards and metrics that we have within the admin center as well too that will also help companies, and customers actually track the number of compliant documents that are coming out. And actually, some of the metrics that we have actually calculate the number of compliant documents that have been generated. So we also have some tools that we can help out there as well. Fantastic. Yeah. You mentioned the content insights, platform, inside of the admin center, which I think is is is a really good example of how user admins at home can, work this out themselves. Right? So as one of the next steps, we're gonna make the calculator that you've seen that I've showed the example of. We'll make this available, and you, at home can use the, the information that you have in Content Insights and start to tweak the numbers a little in in your, however you wish, which I think will be really valuable for you helping you get to this number. Paul, before we go into, kind of advice on how that, you know, users can should really, kind of present ROI in a really valuable way within their organization. I do wanna share a quote from this is from the Templafy one of the Templafy owners. She's a senior graphic designer. Her name's Camilla. And what she said, when I asked her to describe Templafy, is she said, as the saying goes, time is money. While working with Templafy, our consultants can focus on tackling our clients' complex sustainability ambitions, confident that document production is brand compliant and streamlined from creation to submission. So that for me is extremely great to hear. Obviously, you know, there's around, 7,000 active users, week on week from So this is great to see, you know, that the the tool is having an extreme benefit to them. But not only that, there is the, the other compliance aspects and the business aspects. I'm gonna go into some of those now. So I have an on all the machines, and like I mentioned before, that kind of single source of truth. You mentioned around legal ramifications. They actually haven't had any cease and desists. That was something that they did have, previously using, images that weren't copyrighted. They haven't had a single one since, and because everything coming from Templafy enables for seeing this brand compliance. We know that there's been a lot of, dollars in savings and as you've seen from previous slides, we don't need to go over that again. But there's also with those, increases, it also becomes productivity. And you've seen how going from what we saw from, Adobe, experienced something very, very similar. Obviously, the sources, to find these assets have dropped dramatically. So now they can, simply enjoy the benefits of that. But, Paul, I'll be really interested, for us to talk through this, how their how customers should really, measure ROI. Yeah. It's it's a great point, John. And I think what we've got up on the screen here is highlighting some of the some of the key pillars I think you should be focusing on when you calculate ROI. And one one thing I wanna highlight before we get into this, John, is that there isn't a one size fits all approach when you're calculating this. You really need to determine what are some of the goals and objectives of your organization. What's important to you? What how are you how do you measure success within your organization? And what are gonna be some of the key metrics that are gonna be pushing some of your goals and objectives? So when you're calculating ROI, whether it's for Templafy or or any other project, you want to be making sure that any metrics that you're that you're calculating and measuring align with those goals and values for your organization. So we've got some examples highlighted up on the screen here, and you could probably put a dividing line between the the top two and bottom two, between the quantitative side of of of the ROI calculation, what I would say is the qualitative, side. And both, I would say, are equally important because a lot of companies and businesses are trying to drive efficiencies to the bottom line. But there's also some qualitative aspects that I wanted to highlight as well too that you might wanna consider. So first thing, obviously, is accelerating revenue. So if you're having teams spending less time on document creation and more time actually driving revenue for the business, you know, that's gonna free up a lot of time that, that they can be doing that, you know, is actually focusing on on their day to day work. So one of the things that you want to kinda determine when you're calculating ROI is that if you're gonna be giving time back to your people, where is that time gonna be utilized? Is it gonna be utilized on driving more revenue? Is it gonna be focused on driving other activities within the business there? Once you determine that, then you're able to kind of figure out where that impact is gonna be on your bottom line. But with a lot of companies, they, you know, as you saw with the Adobe case study and also some of the surveys that John showed earlier, more than half of people's time when it comes to knowledge work is spent on creating documents. And that's not necessarily driving revenue. So if you're able to take some of that time away for the document prep and allow teams to focus on what they've been hired to do, that's gonna go a long way. Another another thing to wanna measure as well too is optimizing your workflow. So driving efficiencies, reducing costs, less time spent on creating documents, John, means that, you know, there's more time spent doing on other things. And so that can really kind of help help teams out. Then we get into the qualitative aspects down at the bottom there. So derisking your documents, I think, is a key thing. And I think, John, you and I talked about that a fair bit on today's pocket on today's, webinar. But, the importance of it can't really be under, understated. I mean, a lot of people are working in industries that are increasingly being more regulated and, you know, you're finding there are laws and regulations that you have to be compliant with, especially for companies that are doing business within the EU. So this has become a pillar, I think, that more and more companies are feeling like they have to comply with, and it's something that they actually have to measure. You know, it's not just professional services. It's not just accountants that have to deal with this. There's a lot of industries that have to manage this. The problem is is that it's really hard. As John, you and I highlighted, it's hard to measure that. Right? Yeah. But there are some different ways that you can kinda measure the, you know, number of compliant documents that are going out, and then that can provide some comfort of the derisking and keeping documents compliant. And then the last piece, which I think actually gets overlooked a fair bit by companies is, leveling up your user experience for your staff. Is this technology that teams actually wanna use? Is this gonna make users excited about doing some of the work or at least take away some of the pain that's related with creating documents? We've seen an increasing number of customers that are starting to focus on what does that staff experience look like? Can we reduce the number of technology touch points? Can we get the technology that they actually find interesting to use? And there are some companies that actually take a lot of pride in that and being like, we're providing cutting edge technology for that you can use to do your business. And it's not something that shows up in a lot of ROI calculations, but, John, I think we're hearing from a lot more customers that they are starting to value that now because even if it drives efficiency, if it's not a tool that people like to use, then, you know, from a change management perspective, it's gonna be hard to drive that adoption. So I I think a lot more a lot more customers, a lot more people that we're talking to are starting to focus on that aspect. Yeah. It's interesting that you bring up the the tech stack piece and, how organizations wanna provide the best tools. One thing that always makes me smile is when you get we get interest from, form former consultants from, you know, let's say, one of the big fours that you work with. They move to another consultancy. They don't have Templafy. They get in touch and they're like, we you know, where's my Templafy? Why don't you use Templafy? Mhmm. And it really does show that they've seen you know, it becomes it really embeds in people's workflows and becomes, you know, part of their everyday. They they love the tool. When they move, they're kind of without it. So definitely, an interesting metric. I mean, if we could track it a lot better, we'd all be millionaires. So but, but yeah. But, Paul, I think it's, it's really exciting. I think if you could give one piece of advice, one the most important piece of advice to someone within an organization, like, with your time at BDO when you was managing Templafy, what advice would you give them? What would be the one thing that they should focus on above all else? You know, it's it's a tough question to kind of narrow it down to just one thing. But if I was no. No. That's okay. If if I was to narrow it down to just one thing, I would say keep yourself honest. There's a number of different times where people will you know, because as we mentioned, some of this is estimation, some of this is part art versus part science, That means that there can be some manipulation that's done with these numbers. And, you know, I I can't count the number of times that I've seen people maybe, you know, adjust some of these numbers to make a business case actually seem better or worse depending on some of their biases. So one of the things I would definitely say is keep yourself honest. You know? Look at what the savings are going to be objectively, where the time savings going to come from, and, you know, be be ready to kind of back that up. You know, you're you're going to get challenged on these numbers. You're gonna get challenged on some of these calculations. We get questions from customers all the time when they use these calculators in terms of how we came up with these figures. And we welcome that. You know, you should be able to question those calculations, question the assumptions in there, and be able to back that up. There's going to be people that are gonna be using a calculation like this to kind of push an objective or push a project over the line. But I think the more honest that you can be in where the time savings are gonna come from or where the benefits are gonna come when you're calculating the return on investment on temp Templafy or any other technology, that's gonna go a long way because you're gonna be able to defend those numbers a lot more cleanly, and that's gonna make your business case that more that much more robust. Yeah. Exactly. And one of the things I really like about this calculator is it's not the, you know, the end of the line. It's not like a it's it's essentially like a snapshot of time. We can do this on a monthly basis. You can do this on a yearly basis. And not only it doesn't mean that you're underperforming on investment maybe a little low, it just means that, you know, there's areas which we can focus on. As I mentioned, the data helps you analyze where you can focus as an organization. You know, you may have word, templates that are out there and they might not be being utilized. Why? What other tools are being used? You know, is there communication that needs to be done? So this tool can obviously help, on on that level as well. But so one of the things I mentioned is that we are going to be, you know, we can share the, the calculator with you. But even better than that, what we'd like to do, as we've done with, previous customers as well, is set up a time, with you to go through your metrics. And we can do this together, and then we can work out and start building a business case with you. We often present these in our business reviews, with customers anyway. But if you want us to get in touch with you and go through, these calculations with Ewan, please just type yes in the, chat, and someone from either your customer success manager or account manager will reach out to you. You know, time is extremely valuable. We wanna make sure that we're measuring it as best we can. So, Paul, when it comes to return investment and, you know, everything that we've talked about so far, is there anything you would like to leave us with? I think the last thing I would kind of leave with customers is that it may seem like this is a bit of a daunting journey when in terms of calculating ROI because there are so many different variables that it can be accounted for this. But I think it is a worthwhile exercise that, you know, if if you've listened to the past forty minutes of of this webinar, is that it is a worthwhile, endeavor because then you're able to kind of quantify the success that you're getting from your investment, whether it's with Templafy, whether it's with any technology project. You want to be able to kind of back up that investment, and that's gonna show where that effort is going to, where the success is coming from. And I think, John, one of the things that you did highlight as well too is that an ROI calculation can be a measure of success, but it can also be an area where to highlight areas of improvement. If you're not seeing the right return on investment that's coming through, that's not necessarily a bad thing. That can help you to kind of identify, okay, this is the return I'm necessarily getting. Where should I be focusing to kind of increase increase that efficiency? Where are my assumptions wrong? What are some other things within the process that we missed to help improve that? So it shouldn't necessarily be used as a tool to kind of, like, judge the success or failure of a project. It should be able to kind of monitor the project status or monitor the implementation progress. So, you know, like you said, John, use it as a bit of a a progress tracker. You could be running this on a monthly or quarterly basis to kinda see where the success is coming from, and you're only gonna get numbers that are better from there. Because using, you know, putting in the time and effort to calculate how much time people are spending on this kind of work and where the savings potentially come from, that's gonna ultimately give you more informed decisions. And when you're able to show strong ROI like we've shown today, that's gonna allow you to look like a superstar to your, senior people leaders as well too. And we obviously wanna see that for our customers as well. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. It's interesting. Like, just wanna reiterate, I have got an earpiece in, and I was just told that all of the people that have said yes, you can't this is not actually how we're gonna reach out to you. Sorry. There is gonna be a landing page and a form which you need to fill in, and then we'll get in touch with you from there. That's just so we can track the interaction. So, yeah. We're living still living in 2024. I told you we had a break. We've changed some things in the meantime. So, yeah, excuse me. But, yeah, I will make sure. I'll put the form in, either the chat or you'll see it when we close, the webinar. But, yeah, final question I wanna ponder. What would it take for your leadership to view time savings as a legitimate business case? Paul, what do you think? I think, you know, it it it's a good question to ask, and I think it can't be underestimated the amount of time that people are spending on manual document work. And I know that we've been harping on that quite a bit during this webinar. But the statistics back it up. There's a lot of time that people are spending on creating documents despite all the great news and great technology that's coming out now. And I think businesses have to be honest with themselves that this is an area that still needs some focus on. The good news is is that there's technology like Templafy that's out there that can help you with this. And I think having a conversation with us to, you know, allow us to kind of find ways that you can find some more efficiencies within those workflows, That's gonna go a long way in being able to drive efficiency and allow you to see return on that investment. Thank you, Paul. Exactly. I think you hit the nail on the head there. Right? Templafy is just one of many technologies that, can help you in your tech stack. I hope what you've, what we've discussed today and how we kind of measure some of the success of Templafy and help, you know, present that back to the business can help you with your other tools that you use as well. As I mentioned, there's gonna be a landing page, that's gonna give you access if you want to get in touch. Also, I want to as we're talking about time savings and then or automation and efficiency, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't tell you about the next Templafide talks that's coming up. We're gonna be talking again about our document agents. Join myself and our cofounder, Christian Lund, as we unpack what document agents are. That's gonna be part one of a two part series. The second part is we're going to build a document agent live with you on the call, no trickery, and we're gonna test it. So it's gonna be very exciting to see, the progress we've made since our previous, launch webinar. We've spent, a lot of time, a lot of effort, all hands on deck to create the new document agent workflows, and we are very, very excited to present those to you in September. So, from myself, from Paul Vittron, from Isabella behind the camera, which you can't see, but she is the the magic, the special sauce behind Templafy Talks. Thank you very much. She's giving me an awkward look. And for myself, as always, thank you for being part of Templafy Talks, and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks very much.