Spring-Clean your Productivity in 2010 with Nuance

April 1, 2010 - PRLog -- London, United Kingdom, With spring time coming, Nuance Communications, a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions, is taking the seasonal change as an opportunity to introduce its Productivity Action Plan. Devised to help increase productivity in the office, below are five Productivity Action Plan steps that employers and employees can take now:

1. Clear your desk of clutter. Documents on your desk that have not been used for a month can be considered clutter. Clear them off the desk and recycle them – they are clearly not needed. If concerned they might come in useful eventually, use document conversion technology, such as Nuance’s PDF Converter® 6, PaperPort® 12 or OmniPage® 17, to convert mountains of paper piles to digital files. Additionally, Nuance’s eCopy ShareScan® also enables office workers to share digital copiers and scanners to turn paper documents into digital information that is integrated into their communication, collaboration, workflow, and business applications. Stored electronically, the miscellaneous reports, presentations and memos that often clutter a desk, are easier to file, quicker to locate, take up less space and less time is needed when searching for them.

2. Work in time slots. Allocate time slots to make, receive and return phone calls, and leave desktop handsets on voice mail the rest of the time. Allocate similar slots for drafting, sending and replying to emails. Being disciplined with phone, email and IMS communication will prevent other priority tasks that need to be completed from being interrupted. For more advice on how to use time at work even more effectively, consider attending a time management course. More information about effective time management can be found at: http://www.tsuccess.dircon.co.uk/timemanagementtips.htm

3. Consider how to control document costs. The money spent on document handling can be a considerable – and hidden - drain on an organisation’s profitability. Each year, organisations waste money on ineffectively managed documents. Save time – and money – by unlocking the data that’s trapped within increasingly common PDF file format documents by using Nuance’s PDF Converter 6, and the free Nuance PDF Reader that’s now available. Costing only a fraction of the price of Adobe Acrobat, the latest version of PDF Converter enables business users to save both time and money by providing cost effective and easy access to data that’s captured within PDF files without having to retype it. This negates the risk of costly typing errors, and an average cost of £200 in labour spent when re-creating documents. Document retrieval is another area where businesses can incur costs through time wasted while searching for documents. In this capacity, Nuance’s eCopy solutions are a valuable tool that helps address this challenge and saves companies money by reducing reliance on hardcopies, by turning paper-based processes into streamlined and efficient electronic workflows.

4. Consider the productivity benefits of using voice recognition technology. An effective and reliable alternative to the keyboard and mouse for entering data is desktop-based voice recognition technology – such as Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking® 10 software, and MacSpeech Dictate. Desktop speech recognition software enables users to dictate at up to 160 words per minute, which is far more than they can type. This can lead to an immediate improvement in worker productivity, by creating documents more accurately and more quickly. Voice recognition technology can also make the power, performance and communication capabilities of a PC accessible to people with upper-body mobility issues, as it enables them to interface with their PC without having to worry about using the mouse or keyboard. This ensures that they can be just as productive at the desktop as their other colleagues. Critically, in the long term, the technology could also help to reduce the risk of suffering from a desktop workspace-related Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI); with an aging workforce working longer hours, employers should be wary of their legal obligations to their employers under health and safety regulations. More details on how to avoid RSI injuries at the desktop can be found at www.nuance.co.uk.

5. Clean up your Intranet. If a company’s employees need to access the intranet regularly, look at it critically and ask employees’ opinions on how it might be improved to help them access the data and materials they need more quickly. Ensure that the data and information is correct and current, and that if they can’t find what they’re looking for, there’s access to alternative resources that might contain the material they need. Using Nuance’s OmniPage 17, PaperPort 12 and PDF Converter 6, makes it easy to store and file documents and organise them logically, so that those who have the authority to access to the intranet can quickly and easily locate the files or information that they need. Nuance’s eCopy solutions offer a Connector for Microsoft applications, which facilitates the capture, conversion and distribution of paper documents into Microsoft 2007 applications. Using the Nuance’s eCopy Connector for MS SharePoint, paper documents can be scanned at a digital copier or document scanner and sent to specific locations in SharePoint for storage and ongoing document lifecycle management. This makes it easy to ensure that all essential documents feature relevant, up to date documents.

Steven Steenhaut, Sr. Marketing Director EMEA, Nuance Communications, said: “Spring is an ideal time to rethink how you work, and take simple steps to optimise productivity at the desktop. By taking the pragmatic steps outlined in the Productivity Action Plan, this seasonal enthusiasm can be channelled in such a way as to help deliver better results and improved performance.”  

All organisations and professionals can save time and remove the barriers to personal productivity by using Nuance’s award-winning productivity applications, including; Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, PDF Converter 6 and PDF Reader, OmniPage 17, PaperPort 12 and Nuance’s eCopy solutions . Over 20 million customers - and numerous industry awards – validate the quality and performance of Nuance's personal and professional productivity applications. From desktop scanning, OCR/PDF conversion and personal document management, to eForms, speech recognition and dictation, Nuance products are proven to save users both time and money.

- ENDS –
Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc.  is a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Trademark reference: Nuance and the Nuance logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names referenced herein may be the property of their respective owners.

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