The greatest asset in the world is time. But so far, no one has figured out a way to add a 25th hour to their day. Fortunes are invested in assets that save people time, such as corporate jets and real estate in convenient locations. Finding ways to streamline processes to give your employees more time to do what they were actually hired to accomplish can pay huge dividends. However, quantifying the payoff can often be difficult to calculate.
So how can an online company store help? And better yet, how can we quantify the value of time saved?
The first step is to identify opportunities to save time
If your locations and employees do not have access to a corporate approved online store, then they are most likely on their own to figure out what they need to order with often leads to brand abuse (but that’s another topic). So let’s look at a typical order.
- Search online for product ideas (15 minutes)
- Searches for a vendor who can assist with their project (10 minutes)
- Request a presentation from the vendor (5 minutes)
- Determine if pricing is fair (10 minutes)
- Back and forth dialog (20 minutes)
- Samples requested to approve quality (5 minutes)
- Review samples with others upon arrival (20 minutes)
- Place order with vendor (5 minutes)
Total time spent placing order: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Now let’s multiply that out across multiple employees, locations, etc. Let’s assume your company has 50 locations and each location places 20 orders per year on average. Let’s also assume that some employees have a vendor and some orders will be repeat orders. So we will cut the time in half to 45 minutes.
50 locations X 20 orders per year = 1000 orders per year.
That comes to 750 hours per year that your company spends on labor to procure branded merchandise. Let’s assign a value of $30 per hour and we can now determine that this company spends $22,500 annually on labor for employees to procure branded merchandise.
We also need to take into consideration the lost opportunity cost, which often is much greater. Could that 750 hours have been better spent selling your product, promoting your brand or engaging with customers?
With a corporate approved online store, pre-approved items are easily available. The average time frame needed to complete an order is about 3-5 minutes. In this example you have just saved your company $20,500 which does not even include ROI from added time allowing people to focus on the most important tasks at hand. Try plugging this formula in for your own company to determine the immediate return on investment.
