Scenario: Reporting

According to statistical reports, every employee of a large company spends the average of 2-4 hours a month on writing work reports and about the same amount of time on reading the reports of other workers. This is a very important element of internal corporative communication, that is why the procedure of creating reports cannot be excluded from the working process. But it can (and must!) be optimized: Sydock DP allows you to organize the company reporting in such a way, that not only the time for creating reports is reduced, but also the work with finished documents is considerably simplified.

Let us assume that you are a department manager. The following example illustrates how you can use Sydock Document Processor to organize your subordinates' reports processing in the most efficient way.

I. Creating a Report Form

1. Create a report template using Sydock DP. For this, open the standard Status Report template, which comes with Sydock DP, and add the elements denoting the tasks your subordinates must give accounts for (for instance, "Number of new customers", "Amount of sale" etc.) You don't have to be familiar with XML - the process of compiling a template does not really differ from the same process in Microsoft Word.

2. Select a style for your document. For example, if you are planning to publish the form for reporting in the internal corporate site, the style of your form should correspond to the site's style. The best way to create styles is to have them created by a professional web-designer, but you can also test your creative powers with the help of the simple Sydock Document Processor built-in style editor.

3. Save the template in the HTML format through the menu File-->Publish-->Save as HTML. The finished document represents a regular web-form, which contains obligatory and optional for filling out fields, and the buttons "Send" and "Clear".

4. Publish your form in the internal corporative web-site and send its address to those subordinates, who you want to receive reports from.

II. Creating Reports by Employees.

1.To make such a report, an employee goes to the web-page, enters his/her data into your form and clicks "Send". As the report format is fixed and there is no need to think of any wording of his/her own, creating the report takes minimum of time.

2. Depending on what procedure is assigned to "Send" (this is defined when creating the template), the report can be sent to your e-mail address, added to a database or published in a web-site.

III. Storing and Using the Reports.

1. The collected reports can be automatically compiled into an overall department report to be presented to the company's management. Most likely, your boss won't desire to read all the details of what each of his subordinates did during the week, so, in the script of processing, you can specify which fields should be included into the final report and which of them should not. Before Sydock, compiling such a document would take a long time - copying small parts of all the reports using the Clipboard. Now, with Sydock, you can do it with just one click.

2. All employees' reports are stored in the company's database. It allows any team member to:

• find information on the projects similar to the one he/she is working on;
• find out, who is an expert in the interesting him field.
• find out, who has the necessary documents etc.

The advantages of such a reporting system are obvious:

• the department workers spend less time on preparing reports to their managers
• all departments' managers spend less time on preparing reports to the company's management
• the report information is not dependent on the layout and can be easily converted into any format.
• a database, containing information about each particular employee's and  the company's as a whole work, is formed. This allows to increase the efficiency of all activities, avoid task duplication, improve the process of internal corporative communication.