Company Background
Founded in 1945, CARE Canada is a leading international humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. CARE’s story began more than 65 years ago, when it began its emergency relief work by delivering “CARE Packages” to the people of Europe following WWII. As of 2012, CARE has worked in over 80 countries around the world, supporting over 900 poverty-fighting development and humanitarian aid projects to reach more that 83 million people.
Challenges
The CARE Canada Knowledge Management team was tasked with identifying a low-cost Information Communication Technology solution to improve employee productivity. Some of CARE Canada’s pain points included: limited and/or unreliable internet access in developing countries in which CARE works, sometimes leaving staff with limited or no access to corporate data; overstuffed inboxes due to heavy reliance on email to conduct CARE day-to-day operations; and limited automation around business processes and workflows.
Solution
CARE Canada’s Manager of Knowledge Management Technical Solutions, John Oram, a long-time user of X1, brought the solution to CARE Canada’s attention. Seeking a reasonably priced solution, John was confident with X1’s proven ability to quickly sift through and act upon large volumes of indexed data. John’s confidence in X1 was rooted in his prior experience of rolling out X1 in his previous organization, a software development organization, where X1 was successfully implemented and passed the scrutiny of a diverse user community consisting of software developers, testers and a support team.
X1 was primarily evaluated based on its ability to improve productivity, and outperformed Google Desktop (now end-of-life); a Google Developer’s tool that integrates a Google-like search in with CARE’s Enterprise Content Management software; Xobni; as well as sticking with the status quo of Outlook and Windows Desktop search. As part of the evaluation, CARE time-tracked key tasks searching for information without the use of X1, and then tracked time searching for information with X1. CARE’s benchmark test results yielded a saving of approximately 30 minutes per person per week, which equated to just over 10% gain in user productivity – which was just enough to build the business case for X1.
Implementation
X1 was first piloted within CARE Canada’s 10 employee Human Resources unit. Upon identifying X1’s significant productivity gains in its testing, the purchase of X1 was quickly approved, which was subsequently rolled out to CARE Canada HQ employees later the same year.
Special Customization
CARE used X1’s indexing and user interface options to customize the rollout across HQ employee desktops and laptops. For example, CARE customized X1 to make sure that it would have minimal performance impacts as long as there was activity on the user’s keyboard and/or mouse.
Results
At CARE Canada, X1 has provided the following benefits to cross-functional departments, among others:
- X1 enables CARE employees to manage proposal and contract opportunities across different functional teams.
- X1 helps employees to answer questions relating to CARE’s manual business processes and workflows.
- The CARE Fundraising team uses X1 to monitor various email Inboxes associated with CARE Donor correspondence and commitments, thereby providing a more seamless interaction with its donors.
- Multiple support team members, who monitor a single support email address, use X1 to obtain a single, collective view of historical correspondence with end-users, allowing support team members to seamlessly interact with its user community.