Approximately one month per employee is wasted every year, at a cost of $2 million per annum, as employees struggle to find the right documents in sprawling document libraries. A new software called docScout from Australian developer Holocentric, promises to help organisations using Microsoft SharePoint reclaim this lost time by enabling them to find the right document every time.  

docScout works by collating Microsoft SharePoint documents into a simplified and easy to use view. The software guides users to the documents relating to each business activity, making it quick and easy to find the right document every time.   

According to IDC’s report, Bridging the Information Worker Productivity Gap, two weeks are wasted per person searching for but not finding the right document. A further two weeks is wasted per person recreating documents because the current or right document could not be found.   

Holocentric CEO Bruce Nixon says the impacts of relying on search and consequently using an incorrect document can be extremely costly. 

“docScout is a game changer. We’ve calculated that a 2,000 person organisation using Microsoft SharePoint can save more than $2 million by using this software*. With So many organisations focusing on how they can improve productivity and innovation this type of cost and time saving could make a significant impact.”

“Every day employees waste time simply because they cannot find the right document when using document libraries, like Microsoft SharePoint. Search returns results fast but you can never be sure you have found the right document to use.”

“SharePoint is an incredibly powerful and useful platform. However, in an increasingly digital environment, documentation has for many companies, is becoming uncontrollable.” 

“The concept of search is no longer sufficient in helping employees find the right document they need in vast and inconsistent document libraries. One organisation we worked with had over 1 million documents in its document library. The level of duplication and time wasted finding and recreating documents was substantial,” added Mr Nixon. 

With docScout every team has their own automatically generated view. This provides them with a single source of truth ensuring that all team members refer to the same documents, thereby improving compliance, customer service and quality.

Holocentric is an Australian Company that has been providing quality model-based solutions to government, financial services, airlines, technology, manufacturing, and utilities sector organisations since 2002. All of Holocentric’s software and solutions are developed in Australia, with its headquarters located in North Sydney. 

Holocentric’s clients typically operate in heavily regulated and safety conscious environments, they cannot risk their staff using the wrong document (eg, procedure, policy, template, etc) and as a result performing their duties incorrectly, at best resulting in wasted effort and rework, but possibly personnel injuries, compliance breaches and fines.

docScout was the product of requests from Holocentric’s existing client base for assistance in devising a solution targeted at organising the tens of thousands of documents saved into their multiple SharePoint libraries, and importantly, making it quick, easy and reliable for end users to access the right document with confidence, every time.  

Discussing the issues and root causes with these clients, surfaced some common themes. For many, while SharePoint was recognised as offering great document management capabilities, their organisations had struggled to effectively implement and manage their SharePoint growth, resulting in high rates of duplicated and out of date content. 

End users were also becoming increasingly frustrated at the rate of false positives returned in search results and the length of time it was taking to sift through results before they could confidently select the document to use. Search was simply becoming unreliable and a source of operational and regulatory risk. 

Search, in all document management systems, can often become unreliable for three key reasons:

1. High reliance on document authors applying complete and correct meta data and naming conventions, but whom often see little immediate benefit for the extra effort

2. High reliance on the document consumers understanding the metadata and naming conventions applied by the original author, at the time the document was initially created. Consequently while organisation’s move and evolve, the storage location and associated metadata is often frozen in the past, making it confusing and ineffective.

3. Search is only as good as the documents management practices applied, which due to the federated structure of DMS’ such as SharePoint with its multiple sites and document libraries, often result in duplicated content that is difficult to identify and resolve. 

With the knowledge that ‘Search’ was failing in a Business environment, Holocentric set about designing docScout for SharePoint, a FIND based solution that removes the reliance on ‘Search’ and delivers confidence, consistency and productivity savings to SharePoint users and their organisations. 

*$2 million per annum in savings is based on an average saving of one hour per person, per week, at a cost of $50 per hour for a 2,000 person organisation. 

For more information visit www.docScout.com