Case study – Amiee Lynn chooses Activity Monitor to improve its workplace productivity
CUSTOMER’S BUSINESS:
Fashion Accessories
CHALLENGE:
Suspected low workplace productivity.
SOLUTION:
Activity Monitor by SoftActivity
RESULTS:
Major increase in employee productivity and more efficient staffing.
As the popularity of the Internet began to explode in the mid-1990s, employees were increasingly distracted at their computer workstations. The company needed to make their employees productive again – and the CTO needed to do it in a way that didn’t disrupt his own important duties. That’s when they turned to Activity Monitor.
ABOUT AMIEE LYNN, INC.
Amiee Lynn is a well-known fashion accessories brand known for innovative marketing, merchandising and its iconic product line. Launching as a belt company, it now produces a full line of clothing accessories, including jewelry, scarves, hats, cold weather goods and more. After two decades, it has grown to employ about 200 workers.
Located in: New York, NY, USA
Amiee Lynn website
CHALLENGE
Like many companies in the mid-1990s discovered, Amiee Lynn’s management team was suddenly faced with a major productivity drop at a time when technology advances should have sent it through the roof. The cause was easy to see: employees were wasting time on music sharing sites, social media and shopping sites when they should have been working.
The forward-thinking CTO, Jon DeVito, began to manually block computer network access to sites that employees visited. Unfortunately, ‘problem’ employees simply found other websites with which to waste their time. Soon, tracking and blocking websites was taking up too much of the CTO’s schedule, leaving less time for essential business operations.
SOLUTION
Once more, the CTO turned to software to provide a solution for a sizeable network of 150 to 200 computer users. He researched the market thoroughly.
“Some employee monitoring solutions were just too expensive,” DeVito recalls. “Others didn’t scale well, or easily. Even if they did those things well, they didn’t give me the reporting functionality I needed.”
Ultimately, he chose Activity Monitor as the product that most closely met his company’s needs. They’ve been using it ever since, for more than a decade, with few bumps along the way. “SoftActivity’s technical support has been really good. Whenever I contact them, they’ve responded quickly and effectively. It’s been a good ride the entire way!”
RESULTS
Thanks to Activity Monitor, Amiee Lynn now has an effective employee monitoring solution that integrates well with their other security software. The company has seen considerable benefits in their human resources.
Healthy Business Growth with Fewer Staff Required. “Around the time we were experiencing a productivity lag, there were two departments that were requesting more personnel in order to meet their requirements. However, we saw such a major jump in productivity after employees knew they were being monitored that we didn’t have to hire. In fact, we were able to get rid of one position worth $50,000 per year.”
High Productivity Maintained Long-Term. “It wasn’t just an initial jump. They know they’re being monitored, so they’re not sitting around checking Facebook all day. Now, being in the fashion industry, we do have to allow some employees to be able to see shopping websites to check trends in the industry – but we can tell: if they’re spending half a day looking at Louis Vuitton purses, we’ll ask them questions. Five minutes, later, it’s over.”
Improved Allocation of CTO’s Valuable Time. “From the first minute we installed Activity Monitor, we cut out half the time I was spending monitoring people manually. We added one other software tool and works well with Activity Monitor and that chopped out another 45 percent. Now I can spend my time on company priorities rather than worrying what employees are doing.
ABOUT SOFTACTIVITY
SoftActivity is a software products division of Deep Software Inc. Their state-of-the-art employee and student-monitoring software helps organizations to maintain productivity, improve security and streamline business operations.