What might a global insurance provider, an Australian governmental body, and a corporate copywriter based in Baltimore have in common? They’re all using VisibleThread.
We have a bird’s eye view of how our solutions streamline processes – for huge corporate entities and solopreneurs alike. This privilege has been key to pinpointing commonalities in businesses across an array of industries.
Our client base is extremely diverse in terms of industry. That said, they’re all using VisibleThread across the same key areas. Over the years, we’ve witnessed VT Writer and VT Docs working within a multitude of teams. From Comms, to Proposals and Contracts, we’ve seen them all claw back days of their time.
Let’s dive in!
Proposals and Contracts Management Teams
The overriding theme in terms of proposals and contracts is just how time-consuming the process is. For example, some contract writing teams have to revert to their baseline document whenever a contract modification comes in. With VisibleThread, this form of inevitable scope creep is entirely avoidable.
Similarly, when submitting a proposal, or accepting a purchase order, having to ensure your company’s T&Cs align is essential. This can be a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. We’ve collaborated with teams who, prior to using VisibleThread, were searching through multiple documents – using the Control+F function. Life doesn’t have to be this tedious!
VisibleThread helps Proposals and Contracts teams with such time-intensive activities as…
- Shredding contracts, reviewing contract requirements, and searching for Terms & Conditions.
- Checking changes between contracts while improving readability. Comparing the baseline document to the modification is beneficial for teams, especially in terms of customer engagement.
- VT Docs also helps teams while on data calls. Contracts teams can search for terms, such as checking if specific clauses are in a contract, in real-time.
Beyond the core benefits of expedited analysis and review, VisibleThread is also used for…
- Improving contract quality, with teams now identifying rogue clauses plus other extraneous items.
- Reviewing subcontractor agreements.
- VT Docs helps the team with List Notification maintenance and determining changes to any revisions.
In terms of time saved using VisibleThread? We have seen teams reclaim a mammoth eight hours when performing a Business Terms & Conditions review. Prior to implementing the software, searching for relevant T&Cs used to take some teams approximately six hours. By using VisibleThread, teams saw that time reduced to just 60 minutes.
The Proposal and Contracts department can now deliver fully compliant (and winning) proposals in record time.
If we didn’t have VisibleThread, it would have been impossible to have a compliant on-time submission… It’s saving us so much time and brain power. It allows us to focus on what matters for achieving a win and making those business decisions. Before VisibleThread, we were having to manually take care of the mechanics of getting the proposal done.
IT and Legal
The majority of IT Compliance involves managing oversight of IT obligations, security requirements, and risk management. Needless to say the role of this department is becoming increasingly important.
Putting the escalating risk of disinformation aside, there are the ongoing challenges of reviewing customer contracts and identifying cybersecurity compliance. VisibleThread’s solutions lets IT and Legal teams identify key terms, thus speeding up the process. This saves significant amounts of time, while improving the quality of their work. It also helps to bridge the gap between convoluted tech talk and other departments when collaborating cross-functionally.
Clients have found VisibleThread’s solutions to be invaluable for their team’s work and the company’s process improvement initiatives.
With VT Docs auto-identifying terms, teams can quickly scan for key terms rather than reading a full document. Considering these documents can often be over 100+ pages, imagine the time savings!
So, how does this work?
Simply by using Dictionaries in VT Docs. Dictionaries help to highlight terms and produce a starter compliance matrix. VT Docs’ Compliance Dictionary also parses cybersecurity terms.
VT Writer, meanwhile, aids with quality reviews of published documentation. It helps simplify the language, making content more concise – by removing passive voice. It also comes into play for updating policy and procedure documents.
In short, VisibleThread helps to give your IT and Legal team the time to do a higher-quality job. For instance, one team used to spend 30 minutes identifying cyber terms. Now, when using VisibleThread, it only takes five minutes. This equates to an 80% reduction in time spent.
Corporate Comms
Be it internal or external comms, VisibleThread can alleviate all your communication needs! Our solutions guide users towards eliminating verbose terminology and passive voice, bringing more clarity across the board. Below are just five examples showcasing how we’ve helped our clients across comms.
VisibleThread is part of our everyday toolkit. The analytics help us single out words or sentences that could be difficult for the reader to understand. It tells us exactly what to improve and where.
1. Mergers & Acquisitions, while positive overall, can be a stressful time of flux. Therefore, it’s of the utmost importance to communicate the benefits of any M&A concisely. Brevity here is key, with VT Docs helping to reduce necessary details into a single paragraph. This reduction in complexity increases clarity and aids employee engagement.
2. Improving the clarity of policy and procedure documentation is a common goal which VT Writer can expedite. The direct result? Faster change adoption internally. Our clients have often referred to VT Writer as “another pair of eyes to scan documents.” This has been particularly useful when updating senior team members across multiple departments. In turn, this has heightened awareness of the various process improvement projects in play.
3. Using Acronym Check to scan documents has proved to be extremely useful for teams entrenched in abbreviations. While such terms are necessary in most industries, what happens if someone misplaces a letter along the way? Using VT Writer, teams can identify incorrect and inconsistent use of acronyms. Additionally, they can search for acronyms defined in different ways. This results in the quick identification, extraction, and prep of correct acronym lists.
4. Hiring new team members can be tricky and laborious, with many of our clients still reviewing resumes manually. Leveraging the VT Docs Discovery feature, hiring managers can now search for keywords essential to the role. Naturally, this speeds up resume comparison. This highlights the best-suited candidates in real-time.
5. Bringing consistency across communications – while producing elevated content. This has proved evident even with some of our largest clients working subjective matters like Legal on Compliance. Usually, there isn’t a clear launching point for measuring the consistency of a company’s output. So, it’s hard to know where to begin! VisibleThread helps to bring unity throughout a company’s messaging.
VisibleThread has helped us bring some consistency to our content... Through user testing, our clients reported feeling valued and that the content is more sensitive to their needs. They've also acknowledged the clarity and the simplicity of our messaging.
These improvements have resulted in faster adoption of changes, increased clarity in communication, and time-saving when comparing documents. Overall, VisibleThread has proven to be a valuable tool in improving efficiency between departments, irrespective of size.
I would recommend VisibleThread for any company that is seeking to improve their marketing and communications with plain language.
Process Improvement and Operations
You know as well as we do, that everything starts and ends with efficient processes.
Considering everything outlined thus far, the result of using VisibleThread is improved document/contract quality and time saved across all departments. In turn, this expedites sign-off procedure and advances our clients’ process improvement!
Across Services Australia, we couldn’t adjust the writing benchmarks for our project without impacting the whole agency. So, we needed a solution that could segment the different cohorts.
Overall, the adoption of VisibleThread has proven to be valuable to several department’s workflow. Arising issues no longer need innumerable meetings, leading to the inevitable time vortex. Instead, teams are dealing with any arising problems much faster, resulting in improved administration and increased productivity. Let’s break it down.
- Process improvement in contracts
When comparing modifications, contracts teams simply input both documents into VT Docs and run a Compare to highlight all changes. While the output still requires reviewing, the task is now less time-consuming and requires less manpower. Contract quality is also improving, with teams identifying rogue clauses plus various other extraneous items much quicker. - Time saved in reviews
Undertaking a modification with VisibleThread now saves between two-to-three hours. Searching all of the contracts via a specific term/keyword returned yet another eight hours to the team. - Quality Improvement in T&C’s
VT Docs helps in terms of reviewing Terms and Conditions, among other (very) necessary items. For instance, it helps identify quality notes, which would increase costs. This solution now impacts programs positively further down the road. - Improved internal communications means improved processes
We’ve also had the pleasure of seeing our solutions help many Financial Departments significantly reduce time spent on manual processes. This leads to time savings and their process improvement goals being met. Another positive offset of this is improved internal communications, in terms of readability comprehension.
When you can cut through the clutter, and you can provide people with the information they need in an authentic clear and transparent way they can make a decision faster.
- Streamlined processes leads to successful cross-functional collaborations
Clear communication leads to improved processes which, in turn, helps facilitate pivotal collaborations! For example, VisibleThread is a useful tool to deconstruct top-level capabilities into tasks. It can also analyze each word across an RFP or white paper.
We enjoyed a couple of roundtables on successful collaborations, and what they might look like, at Optimize23. You can view our chats here.
Key takeaway
In short, VisibleThread gives you your time back, while optimizing process improvement, company alignment, and proposal writing. It elevates your writing with instant clarity scores, while reducing friction within an organization. It also shreds lengthy documents. This brings necessary insights into what can be eliminated within a process without compromise.
Our clients have experienced significant advancements across multiple departments since implementing VisibleThread’s software. The solution brings huge time savings, improved internal comms, brought alignment with company T&Cs, all while streamlining processes!
VisibleThread is like adding two more people to our team – that we don’t have the luxury of adding. It has saved us time, and money. We’re more efficient at what we do. The bottom line is, as a small business, it helps us compete at higher weight levels than normal.
Ready to see how VisibleThread can help you too? Then please feel free to drop us a line. Our Customer Success team can work alongside you; passing low-priority requests through to our Engineering Team and facilitating ‘lunch and learns’. We have a multitude of training events for onboarding of new team members.
As for all you solopreneurs out there… we’re assuming a fair percentage of you are quite happy with your own company. Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to us if you don’t want to! Here is everything you need to get started.
Let us help you discover the full potential of your company with VisibleThread!
