Economic Impact Report
for empower
Executive Summary
The following key findings were identified with a representative sample of 10,000 users:
Time savings: Over a 12-month period, 10,000 representative users save 26,088 hours by using empower®.
ROI: The investment in empower® generates a return on investment (ROI) of 407% over a 3-year period.
Brand consistency: 91 % of empower® users reinforce their brand through consistent use of brand-compliant templates and content.
Organizations are constantly striving to improve efficiency, but they often neglect two of the biggest time wasters in everyday office life with Microsoft 365: employees spend too much time searching for relevant content and creating complex and standardized documents.
To address this, organizations need to create efficient digital workflows that reduce the burden on employees and help them get their work done quickly and easily. Software solutions such as empower® can help.
This report examines the impact of the empower® Document Generation Suite for Microsoft 365 on productivity, profitability, and brand consistency. The goal is to enable readers to assess the potential impact of empower® on their business.
Investing in modern software solutions helps businesses streamline their day-to-day operations and create the digital workplace of the future. However, especially in challenging times, companies are scrutinizing planned investments even more closely.
Investments are only made if they prove to be truly profitable and sustainable. According to Gartner, in 2024 organizations will shift the focus of their IT projects to cost control, efficiency, and automation, and limit IT initiatives that take longer to pay off.
Organizations need to evaluate potential investments, understand the impact of investments on the business, and demonstrate and justify the tangible value of IT initiatives to senior management and other key business stakeholders.
Before discussing the economic impact of empower® in more detail, let’s review the investment rationale and requirements for software such as empower®.
What challenges lead companies to invest in a software solution like empower®?
Users usually don’t have optimal Microsoft Office skills, so creating documents, slides, and charts takes a significant amount of time and the end results are visually unappealing. Much of the time spent using Office applications focuses on formatting, not on content. Even experienced Office users spend hours creating complex charts.
Users struggle to find the content they need to create documents. Content such as templates, images, and icons are located on different platforms and drives. There’s no intuitive tool for searching these locations, so employees painstakingly click through multiple locations or ask colleagues for help. If they still can’t find the content they need, they often use homegrown content or existing (and outdated) content as a template. This leads to duplication of effort and inaccurate content.
Branding is inconsistent and time consuming. Marketing teams distribute, review, and update content manually. However, the content provided is often not used. Brand guidelines aren’t followed or are misinterpreted when documents are created. Documents, presentations, and email signatures vary widely and don’t comply with guidelines, yet are sent externally. New brand designs are adopted late or not at all because manual conversions are time-consuming and postponed.
- Compatibility with Microsoft 365 and regular updates
- Compatibility with existing software and systems such as DAM, PIM, and SharePoint
- Easy and intuitive to use for all levels
- Low administrative effort when managing and updating content
- A centralized way to store content
- Time-saving features for brand-compliant content creation
About the empower® software
empower® is a leading document generation solution for Microsoft 365 that helps users create and distribute professional Microsoft Office documents. A single library for all documents and templates, centralized management of email signatures, brand-compliant formatting, and numerous productivity tools increase productivity and brand compliance.
Technically, empower® is a SaaS solution hosted on Microsoft Azure, with add-ins for Windows, Mac, and the Web, so making it available on any platform.
Specially optimized for Microsoft 365, empower® integrates directly with Microsoft applications, enriching them with numerous additional features. empower® can integrate with most third-party platforms and systems, including DAMs, PIMs, and SharePoint. This holistic approach replaces numerous other add-ins.
The scope of empower® extends to all organizations working with Microsoft 365 and is industry independent. Typically, the focus is on the following business areas:
- Marketing and corporate communications
- Sales and business development
- Project management
- Control and finance
- Strategy and consulting
The calculations in this report are based on actual usage data from empower®. The data comes from nearly 200,000 users across 983 companies.
Based on this data, a representative sample company with 10,000 empower® licenses was defined and an ROI calculation was performed to provide an overall picture of the economic impact of an investment.
Usage data was collected and analyzed over a 12-month period (01/01/2023 to 12/31/2023). The individual empower® features were grouped together and the number of times each feature was used during this period was tallied.
For each empower® feature, an average time saving was calculated based on a series of tests, which, multiplied by the number of feature calls, gives the total time saved. This is based on the time it takes the user to implement the result with and without empower®.
Actual time savings per feature may vary depending on slide size and presentation. The underlying values are always based on small and less complex presentations.
To determine the ROI of empower®, the time saved was multiplied by an average hourly rate of $40 and related to the pro rata costs for that period.
The table shows selected features and their time savings:
Compared to using Microsoft Office applications without empower®, the representative sample of 10,000 empower® users saved 26,088 hours over a one-year period, according to telemetry data. Multiplied by an hourly rate of $40, including all direct and indirect costs, this equates to a savings of $1,043,500.
In addition, on average, more than half of all documents are based on an existing document. This is where another major time waster comes into play: searching for elements and files. Templates, images, or icons are often scattered in storage locations and versions can’t be clearly determined.
empower® provides employees with a central library for all brand assets, templates, and documents that can be searched and used with just a few clicks. Version history is included.
Did you know that over 30% of the time spent working with PowerPoint, Word and Excel is spent on formatting? empower® drastically reduces this time and goes far beyond the standard features of Office applications. Numerous features simplify or eliminate manual tasks in the Office applications. empower® frees you to concentrate on creating compelling content.
91% of employees strengthened their brand in Microsoft Office documents.
The monetary value of that brand enhancement can’t be quantified for the purposes of this report. However, it can be said that empower® helps to strengthen the brand in external communications through the consistent use of brand-compliant templates and content. This is because 91% of users use the branding features of empower® at least 10 times per month within 12 months.
In addition, the use of empower® significantly reduces the IT department’s involvement in Microsoft Office branding activities. Without empower®, the branding team has to manually update individual templates or slides and then work with IT to support the technical aspects of updating or distributing corporate content. With empower®, the specialist department, in this case the branding team, can automatically and centrally distribute the updates to all users throughout the company.
Did you know that the majority of Office documents are used externally, yet almost one in two isn‘t brand compliant? The empower® template library, corporate design-compliant font and color picker, and design check ensure that every presentation, document, and email signature reflects your corporate design and strengthens your brand.
During the initial setup, all templates, design elements, and features included in empower® are customized to match your corporate design. Users then leverage the predefined features and content and never have to worry about whether they’re working in line with the brand. In addition, old presentations and documents can be automatically converted to the current corporate design with just a few clicks.
One time cost for empower®: $117,400
Recurring cost for empower®: $166,800
The empower® implementation process is similar to what’s considered standard for an IT project of this size. The IT team handles the technical aspects of the implementation, while the project or branding team ensures that all the necessary content is available and can be stored in the software. Training is an important factor for most companies to ensure that employees can quickly realize the full potential of the software, so they conduct an initial training initiative after implementation, supported by empower.
As an example: for a user count of 10,000, the initial setup of empower® costs approximately $15,000, depending on the scope. Configuration could cost $22,400 for a project team of 8 people, each working 25% of the time for 2 months. An additional $80,000 is needed to train 4,000 employees for 0.5 hours each. In this scenario, setup, customization, and training total $117,400.
The annual recurring license fee for 10,000 empower® licenses in this scenario is $150,000 (or $15 per user), depending on the scope. This is in addition to the $16,800 for ongoing internal support.
This results in a total cost of $284,200 in the first year. In years two and three, costs are limited to recurring licensing and support totaling $166,800.
* in ,000 USD
BearingPoint achieves ROI of 762 %
BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consulting firm with European roots and global reach. The firm operates through three divisions: Consulting, Products, and Capital.
BearingPoint’s clients include many of the world‘s leading companies and organizations. BearingPoint’s global network of more than 6,500 employees supports clients in over 70 countries and is committed to working with them to achieve measurable and long-term business success.
The consulting firm not only optimizes its clients’ business processes, but also places great importance on efficiency and consistency in its own internal processes. That‘s why BearingPoint chose the empower® software suite. Our Microsoft 365 add-in solution supports around 5,000 employees in the efficient creation and management of brand- compliant and professional Office documents.
Searching and formatting content in Microsoft 365 blocked resources
As with most consulting firms, creating presentations is part of BearingPoint’s daily business, whether for internal purposes or to present results to clients. When creating these presentations, a significant amount of time was often spent searching for existing templates or slides, or creating new ones. Time that could have been better spent. The tedious process of creating charts and translating slides was also a huge effort.
Brand-compliant presentation creation made easy
BearingPoint decided to license the empower® software suite to approximately 5,000 employees. After extensive testing, the software was rolled out in 2022. The central library of templates, slides, images and icons, as well as the format- ting and productivity tools, are particularly popular with users. These enable the use of brand-compliant and approved content with just a few clicks, eliminating tedious manual work and long searches. And the automatic translation function via DeepL reduces the manual workload by translating slides directly in PowerPoint.
8,500 hours more time for what really matters
“The numbers are impressive. With an ROI of 762%, the investment has really paid off and our employees are happy to be able to create their presentations even more efficiently with empower®,” says Larsen Günther, Head of Knowledge & Information Management at BearingPoint.
As a result, empower® saves BearingPoint employees an enormous amount of valuable time. According to the analysis of anonymous telemetry data, they saved more than 8,500 hours in 2023 alone. This corresponds to a 762% ROI.
This leaves more time for what really matters: meaningful analysis and evaluation. And empower® also helps strengthen the brand, as 95% of users create brand-compliant Office documents every day.
The most popular empower® features at BearingPoint:
Using empower® eliminates the biggest time wasters in document creation and distribution in Microsoft 365. The numbers show that empower® not only helps brand, compliance, and IT teams control and streamline the creation of documents and presentations by employees across the organization, but also has a proven positive impact on the bottom line.
An investment in the empower® software suite for Microsoft 365 pays for itself in just a few months. Investing in empower® isn’t only an investment in productivity. It’s also a commitment to innovation and continuous improvement. Modern software solutions are critical to shaping the workplace of the future and staying competitive.
In addition, the ability to work with modern tools shows employees that the company values their professional development and relies on advanced solutions. Simplified, digital, automated work processes increase productivity, and also employee motivation and satisfaction.
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