As remote working becomes a reality in South Africa, companies of all sizes are facing the challenge of how to properly manage their workforces.
By Kathy Gibson
Indeed, the new way of working has thrown issues like productivity and efficiency – long thorny issues for most organisations – into sharp focus.
Graham Fry, founder of South African software developer Saucecode, explains that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has driven a fundamental shift in the nature of work – and the workplace itself.
“The workplace has become far more digital, so the work people are doing, and the way they do it has to change too,” he explains. “And that means the way we measure work productivity has got to change.”
While it’s easy to measure physical output, measuring productivity and efficiency is not that simple, he adds.
Saucecode has developed a solution to this problem: Tistro helps managers to monitor and measure both their and employees real output and efficiency, and to analyse that data to assist in business decision-making.
“The ability to granularly analyse big data means we can start measuring the productivity and efficiency of people – not just in the physical world, but in the computer-based world.”
This tool has been used by companies – including Saucecode itself – to measure worker’s efficiency and productivity, and to effectively manage a remote workforce.
The solution is available as both an on-premise application and managed service available via the cloud; and Saucecode is actively working with a channel of resellers.
Saucecode co-founder Brian Little points out that reseller partners can use Saucecode’s cloud infrastructure, or buy licences to provide their own service.
“We can also supply licenses if end users want it in their own on-premise system or private cloud; and we can work with third-party cloud providers as well.
“We are happy to provide the software in whichever way is most effective for the partner and customer.”
Partnering to supply Tistro to a wider range of customers means the service can be made available to organisations of all sizes, from SMEs right up to the biggest corporates and just about anyone inbetween, Fry points out.
SauceCode aims to be a true partner, so it’s looking to sign up a small family of resellers who work with customers that can truly benefit from using Tistro.
“This would typically be someone who works with companies who have computer-based staff or addressing the area of accounting, technical support, or network operation control,” Fry says. “Resellers working into verticals like financial services would also find the tool very useful.
“Any business that has a volume of their users working on computers, and wanting to manage efficiency, would be a viable Tistro customer.”
Tistro doesn’t just allow managers to monitor if people are working. It lets them ensure the correct work is being done, and the correct processes followed.
Little points out that this kind of monitoring and measurement is not only a human resources (HR) function and shouldn’t necessarily be left to the HR department to implement.
“It is a management function. If it ends up in HR, it means that management has failed.”
IT, for example, would also find the reports useful as it gives a completely accurate picture of what applications users log into, and how efficient or productive they are in various systems.
Additionally, it can identify and list any application added to the company network on any monitored device and the use thereof, whether authorised or not. These applications can then be categorised with a BRAG system as business , non-critical, personal or undesired applications for further monitoring or actioning.
“You equally can’t think of Tistro as just a kind of automated timesheet solution,” Little adds. “Yes, it does that, but is also talks to efficiency, financial planning, realistic, practical and achievable personalised KPI setting and resourcing.”
Because it can have such wide ramifications across the organisation, Fry believes Tistro need to be sold across the board and everyone in an organisation who has a management role should be involved in the decision making and implementation of the product and the value of its output.
“Every one of the managers should be able to derive benefit from Tistro,” he says. “It enables them to gauge if general efficiency is going up or down, and whether it is being maintained. It also helps to maintain that efficiency once it is up.
“It can also help companies to accurately specify job requirements for recruitment of staff management.”
It is significant that Tistro doesn’t push the usual agenda of comparable products, which tend to place productivity in a negative light.
“Most other products measure timekeeping or productivity – not efficiency,” Fry explains. “But if you do it properly – as we do with Tistro – managers can start to guide their staff, and improve both productivity and efficiency. It is all about having positive interactions with your people.”
The reseller partners that sign on with Saucecode would be involved in initial consulting for customers. “This is why we need to work in a small framework of partners,” Little explains.
“We will train our partners in the use of the product and get them to where they can analyse the data it produces; and they can help the company to analyse and measure results against the reality of the business and the workers’ job specifications.”
Resellers that partner with Saucecode need to be able to add this kind of value, and revenue streams to themselves of course Little adds. “We are not looking to work with order-takers or box-droppers. We aim to partner with resellers that add value to their customers, and would use Tistro to help them do this.”
Customers and resellers don’t have to be business intelligence experts to use Tistro or derive value from it.
“We are developing a series of reports across all features of the product, that will be automatically sent to the relevant department heads,” Fry says.
“These reports will provide them details of the parameters they are measuring, and link back to graphs and raw data as necessary, granularly recorded down to individual and second.
“Customers and resellers can use these reports, and they can also delve deeper into the data to do their own analyses based on specific requirements or scenarios.”
How to partner
Saucecode is welcoming new Tistro partners now, and will work with resellers to ensure their success.
“We have a formal resellers’ programme,” Little explains, “We work with our partners to train their sales people and their technical staff.
“The product is actually very easy to deploy and to use since the algorithms we have developed do all the heavy lifting – so we are not selling rocket science.”
A generous margin of 20% or more on both the sale and an annuity income makes partnering attractive, and partners can also develop their own revenue streams from consulting and other services around the Tistro systems.
“Services could include maintenance, system set-up, analysis consulting and more. Partners can also use Tistro to help their customers analyse their application usage to maximse their software licencing.”
Shadow IT is a reality for most companies, and partners can provide additional services, using Tistro to identify what applications are being downloaded or otherwise introduced into the corporate system.
“It can help them to determine if a shadow application are innocuous or dodgy; useful or detrimental to efficiency,” Little points out.
In many companies, particularly SMEs, the reseller partner is the de facto IT department and have service level agreements (SLAs) that have to be met. Tistro can help resellers to manage their SLAs and even go beyond.
“Importantly, because resellers can use Tistro to help companies to be more efficient or to save money, they become a more trusted partner than ever before,” Little says. “It also means that when they have contact it is to offer additional value that helps the customer to improve their business.
“The reseller becomes a true partner. So when they sell something, the customer knows it will solve a real problem. They are in the business with the customer and can give them useful advice.
“This is not about just selling the product. It is about developing a relationship and offering services.”
Saucecode also offers resellers a range of value-adds, including free licences and the ability to do proof of concept (PoC) projects with customers.
“We also have account managers who can assist them and their sales teams when they talk to end users,” Little adds. “Currently, we are doing all the PoCs for our resellers, and will continue to do that until they build their own skills sets.”
Generally, a PoC is for 30 days with a limited number of users and is carried out in a sandbox created via the partner portal. This lets the customer evaluate the product in their own environment. They can do their own analytics, or we can provide them.”
Two account managers, one inland and one working with coastal partners, are on hand to help resellers.
“We want to support the reseller as much as possible,” Little stresses. “My entire life has been working in the channel, so we understand the channel and ensure that our account managers are all channel focused.”
Loyalty is a given, he adds. “We have no interest in selling direct and will always be loyal to the channel,” he says. “At the same time we want loyalty from our partners: they need to be active with us and involve us in their endeavours.”
Saucecode is a South African company, and Tistro was written by local developers in South Africa, Fry points out.
“This means the expertise is here for anything the customer may need. And the money stays here too.”
Saucecode is a software development and innovation company that employs cutting-edge technologies including robotics to create business applications and products that deploy into a variety of industries.
Software applications are based on Saucecode’s intellectual property (IP) and available under license for general market consumption.
The company addresses a number of areas of development: Internet of Things (IoT); Web development; web and native app development; e-commerce; distributed software and API development; user experience (UX); artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.
Tistro is a general business software application that delivers the ability to measure, monitor and manage time and productivity, helping business to truly understand the productivity and behavior within their user base in order to monitor, manage, enhance and even automate time and productivity outputs.
Learn more about Saucecode at www.saucecode.tech