Overview
Business Area:
National Geographic Channel Research Lifecycle
Platform: Claris FileMaker, Type: Workflow Automation
Project Overview:
NatGeo organization relied on fragmented, email-based processes and multiple disconnected systems to manage research requests, resulting in operational inefficiencies, delays, and limited visibility. The absence of a centralized Research Request Management solution hindered the automation and governance of the request lifecycle, from intake and assignment to tracking and reporting. This led to poor transparency into request status, researcher productivity, workload distribution, and auditability, creating challenges in accountability, compliance, and overall operational effectiveness.
Challenges
- Company and contact information require manual maintenance and updates, increasing administrative effort and the risk of data inconsistencies.
- Research request details are tracked manually, making it difficult to ensure accuracy and maintain a complete history.
- There is no centralized repository for researcher information, resulting in fragmented data and limited accessibility.
- Research requests are manually assigned to researchers, creating inefficiencies and potential delays in distribution of workload.
- Request assignments rely on manual email communications, which can lead to missed notifications and limited traceability.
- Stakeholders have limited visibility into request status, progress, and completion, making monitoring and follow-up challenging.
- There is no centralized mechanism to track researcher effort and time spent on requests, reducing insight into resource utilization.
- Reporting capabilities are limited, with a lack of comprehensive audit trails and historical records for analysis, compliance, and decision-making.
Our Solution
- Developed a custom application using Claris FileMaker to automate and manage the entire research request lifecycle. The solution provides a centralized platform for managing companies, contacts, projects, researchers, and research requests while streamlining workflows through automated notifications, tracking, and reporting.
- Company Management: Maintains a centralized company master database, supports multiple contacts per company, and tracks complete contact interaction history.
- Researcher Management: Manages researcher profiles, availability, workload allocation, and assignment history.
- Research Request Management: Facilitates request creation, assignment, status tracking, priority management, due date monitoring, and request lifecycle management.
- Email Automation: Automatically generates and sends request-related communications, attaches required forms, and maintains email delivery and tracking records.
- Time Tracking: Captures actual hours spent on research activities, completion dates, and detailed research notes.
- Reporting & Analytics: Provides comprehensive reporting on open, completed, and pending requests; researcher workload and productivity; time utilization; company- and project-based request analysis; and email activity tracking.
- Audit & Compliance Logging: Maintains a complete audit trail of record creation and modifications, researcher assignments, status changes, and email communication history to ensure transparency and accountability.
Key Benefits
- Standardized and streamlined workflow for managing all incoming research requests.
- Centralized repository for companies, contacts, researchers, and request data.
- Automated researcher assignment notifications to reduce communication delays.
- Automated email generation with delivery tracking and monitoring.
- Real-time tracking of request status, progress, and completion.
- Accurate researcher time and effort tracking for workload analysis and resource planning.
- Comprehensive operational dashboards and reporting for data-driven decision-making.
- Complete audit trail and activity history to ensure transparency and accountability.
- Reduced manual administrative effort through workflow automation.
- Improved turnaround times and overall operational efficiency for research assignments.
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Research Specification Request:
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