Many of you are probably putting together final revisions for your 2014 plans. I’ll place an educated bet that for most of you, one of your top five initiatives will focus on streamlining business processes to reduce your operating costs in order to achieve targeted operating margins. This is my favorite time of the year. It’s a time that businesses really appreciate the value of our voice technology solutions. It’s especially a fun time because when we engage with management that is thinking about achieving strategic objectives, the significance of our voice solutions increase in business value.

While reading the recent WH Smith’s quarterly financial press release, I could not be happier to see that their high street operating profit rose 4 percent to £56 million. They communicated that “savings in its supply chain played a vital role. Systems such as voice picking have contributed to an overall saving of £18 million across its high street business, meaning that profits rose despite 7 percent drop in sales.” 

Measuring savings attributed to implementation of voice technology is nothing new, but it’s always exciting to see organizations who mention their operational success in financial press releases.  We continue to measure the hard dollar (and euro and pound, etc.) savings that our customers obtain annually from their use of Vocollect Voice. In 2013, the amount will exceed $20 billion. Check out the live savings counter at http://www.vocollect.com/feature/savings. This value is as of November 11, 2013.

Now you may be wondering how this savings counter is actually calculated. It’s really quite simple. We looked at an “average burdened hourly rate”- and we ended up using $20/hour. While most of our customers can point to improvements in productivity throughput well above 20 percent- some even report 35 percent positive results - we decided to use a pretty conservative 15 percent improvement in overall productivity. We then multiplied the number of Vocollect Voice users each and every day. The number using Vocollect Voice is approaching almost one million each and every day. It’s that simple of an equation. And it’s amazing how much of positive impact voice technology can have to your bottom line.