Case Studies

Government Agency I
Customised Business Documents and Forms

Government Agency Increases It's Ability to Earn Revenue and Eliminates Department In Fighting

From unprofessional reports and amateur tender briefs to well presented reports and documents one of New Zealand’s major crown research institutes (CSI) is now well on its way to boosting its revenue earning opportunities and maintaining its credibility.

By making it easier for their highly technical staff members to present their research proposals in a digestible and professional format to their clients, AuthoDox has helped this CSI’s ability to market and promote its services. And, as a by-product of the AuthoDox service, previously strained working relationships between departments are now harmonious.

Background

This CSI was formed in the late 1990s when the Department of Science and Industrial Research was disbanded and separated into stand alone entities. These entities along with other government agencies now operate as state owned enterprises - with their own governing bodies and they are expected to generate their own revenue.

The CSI has six offices around the nation, with approximately 800 staff members and supplies scientific research services to both government entities and private corporations.

Like other revenue earning organisations the CSI must compete in the marketplace to earn business. They regularly submit proposals and tenders to prospective clients to gain contracts.

These tenders and proposals are prepared by the ‘technical teams’ who will carry out the service, should the proposal be successful. The ‘technical team’ follow a basic template to prepare the proposal documents.

The completed proposal documents are then passed onto the ‘presentation team’ who personally submit and present the documents to the prospective clients.

The Frustration

The ‘presentation team’ regularly struggled to pitch the CSI’s experience and talent. They felt the proposal documents supplied to them by the ‘technical team’ were inferior with their haphazard layouts and inconsistent formatting. Prospective clients also did not show much confidence in the proposal documents, and they would readily question the CSI’s credibility based on the presented documents.

Frustrated by the inferior documents the ‘presentation team’ began to look for a solution to ensure the ‘technical team’ produced presentable documents. They believed the document templates the ‘technical team’ used needed some re-assessment and so engaged the services of AuthoDox.

The Assessment

Listening to both teams AuthoDox was quickly able to assess the real problem.

The ‘technical team’, although highly qualified experts in their technical field, were not expert word processing users. They followed the supplied document templates but the templates were found to lack structure for the ‘technical team’ to follow. The document templates still required the ‘technical team’ to format the documents. They had to layout the information with correct margins, headings, and category listings, which each individual ‘technical team’ member completed with their own preferences and limited word processing skills.

This environment created a mis-mash of documents with no consistency and no set presentation standards. And, although the information they supplied was credible, to a non technical reader the documents lacked persuasiveness because of their poor presentation.

It was also found that the ‘technical team’ members were just as frustrated at the current system as they were spending considerable time on document preparation, rather than information preparation.

The Solution

With the collaboration of members from both the teams AuthoDox re-designed the document template. Parameters such as a document options, a style guide and formatting were included in the templates. And, following a successful testing and refinement phase the nationwide rollout began.

Result

As the AuthoDox team are highly experienced in providing customised documents and forms the template system was quickly and seamlessly delivered to the CSI.

And, now with the standardisation of reports and presentation structure both the ‘technical team’ and ‘presentation team are able to operate efficiently and effectively. The ‘technical team’ are now able to complete their proposal documents easily and the ‘presentation team’ now have professionals documents to promote.

The CSI is now able to make it’s scientific services more easily marketable to other crown and public entities, so increasing its opportunities for greater revenues earned.

Government Agency II
Customised Business Documents and Forms

Cost effective

Producing complex invoices on a form required by a Government agency directly by analyzing and extracting the data from the accounting system. Reduced turnaround time from 20 days to 3 days.

Private company I
Customised Business Documents and Forms

Innovation

Process orders to a printing company direct from email. Customer fills out order in a word document form and emails it to the printer. The email is deciphered and turned into code that the electronic print press recognizes and processes the order and prints the finished articles.

Who Should Use Customised Business Documents and Forms?

• Lawyers
• Government agencies
• Private companies