TODAY'S BUSINESS CHALLENGE:

With the rapid growth of the Internet and the wealth of opportunities arising from e-commerce, Martin's business-to-business public relations firm has taken a new direction. Not only does he have more new technology clients (backed by lots of venture capital) than he can handle, his clients all want to see results "yesterday."

Using a select group of nerdy friends and former engineers who can "walk the dot.com walk" and "talk the technology talk," Martin's company helps new businesses focus on the future by working behind the scenes to strategize their marketing plans. By asking the more technically adept people on his staff to interview the industry's top experts in each client's field, he delivers a new style of value-added market research to his services. The problem is that many of these interviews must be conducted during conference calls when everyone is trying so hard to concentrate on what the industry expert is saying that nobody is taking very precise notes.

Up until recently, Martin's solution was to tape each conference call and then ship the tapes to someone in another state who could transcribe what was said. But because of the poor sound quality on the tapes, critical dialog that was lost when a call lasted longer than the length of a tape, and the limited skills of the person transcribing the tape, Martin now needs to find a new transcription service. If possible, he would also like to reduce the turnaround time on delivery of the conference call transcripts and save a fortune on FedEx charges.

TOMORROW'S BUSINESS SOLUTION:

A friend of Martin's who is a technical writer refers him to Alert & Oriented Transcription Services. After learning how to patch Alert & Oriented's digital dictation system into one of his conference calls, Martin is happy to discover that:

Because A&O's dictation equipment records in digital sound, it will be much easier for its transcriptionists to understand these interviews than if they had been recorded in analog sound (on tape).

As soon as Martin's conference call is over, the digital sound file is available to A&O's transcriptionists, thus cutting at least 24 hours off the previous turnaround time.

Because A&O's digital dictation system places no limit on the length of his conference calls, there is no risk of missing any dictation.

Because his interview transcripts are delivered electronically, Martin is probably cutting another 24 hours off the previous turnaround time.

With conference call transcripts being returned to him in soft (electronic) format, it will be easier for Martin to immediately distribute copies of each document by e-mail to all of his associates who are working on a particular project. These people can then cut and paste important text from the transcripts directly into their reports.

Here's the best part: After crunching some numbers, Martin discovers that not only can he cut 48 hours off his previous turnaround time (which will help him appear more responsive to his clients) -- but, since his firm handles at least three of these conference calls per week, he is saving the cost of six FedEx shipments per week. Six shipments times 50 weeks out of each year (at $10 per shipment) gets him a faster turnaround for a better work product with $3,000 saved in courier costs!

Not bad. Not bad at all!