For the last three years, Maya has worked as a senior implementation specialist at Brightwell Systems, helping new workforce management clients test, onboard, learn, and integrate our products into their organizations. Somewhere inside that 8-to-12-week implementation process, Maya noticed eleven minutes that didn't seem like much at first. Turns out, they were worth quite a bit.

One of the first things Maya and the team must facilitate with each new client is importing their employee data. To do this, clients provide their specialists a CSV with employee ID, name, location, department, and several other fields of information.

Maya describes, "What happened was clients would send me their file, and after initial ingestion I would flag the discrepancies in different fields on the spreadsheet. Then, after fixing the obvious ones, I would go through and verify the remaining flagged fields of data while meeting with the client."

It didn't take long before Maya knew there had to be a better way. "It just felt like I was always trying to justify to clients why I was hung up on these little discrepancies, because most people don't really stop and think about the downstream impact of feeding the system bad data." On top of the time spent on that process, Maya saw another hurdle to overcome early in the client relationship. She described clients' initial reactions simply: "They saw it as kind of a waste of their time."

So, Maya set out to give her clients some of that time back. She started informally tracking the time she spent with clients on this stage of onboarding. After she'd gone through the data import with 25 new clients, she determined the average amount of time she and her clients spent meeting to review their files.

"I started calling it my 'eleven-minute problem,'" she says with a laugh.

Rather than continuing to watch clients' eyes glaze over after the tenth data field that needed clarification, Maya created what she called a "Data Mapping Workbook" that she could send to clients two weeks before their first migration. Instead of simply asking them to send their employee file, the workbook illustrated exactly how their data would connect to the workforce solution they would be implementing.

The files Maya received started containing far fewer fields that needed to be corrected. Her client meetings became easier. But Maya didn't stop there.

Her workbook quickly became a standard practice among the team. The client experience was improving. Implementation specialists were saving time. But Maya knew they could do better.

Maya went to her manager, Abby Scheel, and together they brought Maya's workbook and a concept to the Product Operations, Engineering, and Technology teams. That's where a data mapping workbook meant to solve Maya Torres' "eleven-minute problem" became something much bigger.

With the help of Maya and Abby, the engineering team began building a data validation preview layer into the client portal's import tool. Launched in late May, the data validation preview has been credited with reducing data-mapping conversations with new customers from an average of 11 minutes to just 3 minutes. Support tickets related to the process have dropped by 26%.

Before the change, 70% of employee records imported successfully without intervention. Today, that number is 91%. In addition, the change helped the team deliver on our promise of People First. One of Maya's coworkers described the difference this way: "Now I get to spend the time teaching them how to actually use the platform instead of asking them to stay on the line with me while I complete a bunch of data entry. It's so much better!"

Maya Torres isn't a programmer or software engineer. She wasn't handed a project along with a team and resources to complete it. She didn't start by writing proposals or business cases. Nobody told her to study or fix anything. Maya noticed eleven minutes.

And she knew those eleven minutes could be delivering far more value for her clients and her team. Reflecting on it, Maya said, "At first I thought, 'Meh, eleven minutes. Who cares?' Eleven minutes didn't sound like enough time to start a whole project over. But once I thought about it for a second, I realized it wasn't just about me, and we weren't losing eleven minutes once. We were losing the same eleven minutes hundreds of times."

That is how Maya Torres found the eleven minutes that actually represented 227 hours and about 350 support tickets over the course of a year. That is how Maya turned eleven minutes inside a single onboarding meeting with a client into a solution with cost savings of at least $25,000 every year.

Thanks, Maya. You rock.

Maya Torres found $25,000 hiding inside 11 minutes.

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