Time Task management solution for SMEs to Improve Focus and Maximize Work Efficiency

Project Information

Taskfit PRO

Grant agreement ID: 673990

DOI

10.3030/673990

Project closed

EC signature date 17 August 2015

Start date 1 August 2015

End date 31 July 2017

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 2 003 500,00

EU contribution

€ 1 402 450,00

Coordinated by

BASEWALK KERESKEDELMI ES SZOLGALTATO KORLATOLT FELELOSSEGU TARSASAG
Hungary

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Taskfit PRO (Time Task management solution for SMEs to Improve Focus and Maximize Work Efficiency)

Reporting period: 2016-08-01 to 2017-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The overall issue we address with our project focuses around human multitasking as is an existing and continuously growing phenomenon. Office workers constantly receive new tasks from a variety of sources: telephone calls, ad-hoc requests, e-mails, adverts, etc. Mental task switching is the process of shifting from one mental state (task set) to another. Performance on individual tasks is disrupted when a switch from one task to another is required. This disruption is characterized by a lower efficiency and decrease in accuracy on a given task. This is known as the switch cost. According to recent research one task switch between two elementary tasks might waste only 1/10th of a second, but studies have shown that if we do a lot of switching in a day it can add up to a loss of a whopping 40% of our productivity. The more complex the tasks and the more tasks we have, the higher the switch cost. The overall impact of the phenomenon of multitasking is that we become less productive and more stressful, which places a negative impact on our overall performance and productivity. Our aim is to resolve this long existing problem and provide a handy and feasible solution to all office workers to work more effectively and create a healthy work-life balance.
The overarching objective of Taskfit is to improve personal productivity and as a result increase the efficiency and profitability of companies by helping the user focus on a specific task and maintain a continuous workflow. We implement this by combining the specific advantages of a task management and a time tracking and timesheet system into a generic, low footprint, task execution front-end that provides accurate working time information with zero administration. The controllability and the availability of relevant, real-time data to serve as a basis of business decisions is a crucial factor in a company’s life and daily operation. The Taskfit PRO task management and productivity solution gives a unique solution for such challenges.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

As per our Objective 1, we have made the product available to a wider audience by porting it to all popular platforms and devices and providing out-of-the-box integrations with the most common corporate systems. The Taskfit client has been tested and launched on Windows desktop and Android smartphone and tablet, iPad and iPhone, macOS desktop and Linux. In terms of integrations, Taskfit cooperates seamlessly with such personal productivity tools as Wunderlist, Google Calendar and office 365 Calendar, ticketing systems like Jira and Youtrack, BPM systems like jBPM and Oracle BPM, project management tools like MS Project and BaseCamp.
Regarding Objective 2, the Taskfit product portal has been in live operation for several months. Users can download and try the free version of Taskfit. The advanced subscription management features (including group functions and credit card payments) were released in April 2017, together with the non-free versions of the Taskfit client. Enterprise Taskfit clients do not share the same Taskfit server, they can use their own infrastructure or the private cloud infrastructure provided BaseWalk or other providers to host their isolated Taskfit environments.
According to our Objective 3 we worked towards re-positioning Taskfit to the B2C market. Since Q2 of 2017 we have been operating a 24/7 contact centre and we set up a training site with the necessary training materials ready as previously planned.
As per Objective 4, we are to successfully commercialize Taskfit PRO. The Customer Development Plan and the Business Innovation Plan has been revisited and delivered as required. It included a detailed analysis on the market potential of the product, the key milestones of the plan itself and a detailed action plan in terms of who our potential customers are, what competition there is on the market, what other influencing factors we need to consider when launching Taskfit to the public, what key selling points to build our communications strategy on and what sales and marketing strategies we are applying to support the launch of the product.
Regarding Objective 5, the demonstration version of the Taskfit Business Process Analysis (BPA) tool is ready. The tool takes its input from the raw data collected by the Taskfit clients during normal operation then it applies a process mining algorithm to generate graphs of the activities discovered in the raw data. We have put a lot of effort into building up a solid theoretical background behind our mining technics. Several existing algorithms (deterministic, heuristic, genetic) have been studied and adapted to our special purposes. Each implemented algorithm has its strengths and weaknesses. When using the Taskfit BPA tool, the user can choose the processing algorithm that best suits a particular analysis. The outputs of the algorithmic process analysis are passed to the visualization module of the Taskfit BPA tool, that generates BPMN models of the processes. Users can also edit the models manually to correct any potential mistakes made by the analyzer.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Based on the opportunities provided by the trends showcasing in terms of cloud computing by enterprises and the emerging of independent workers all representing a significant market opportunity, we keep our approach in terms of forecasting a significant growth potential for our company with a prestigious available market size. Although our solution can be employed in almost all business sectors, the traditional beneficiaries of it continue to be the „white collar” workers and the management teams.
In order to separate our product from competition, we emphasize its unique selling points to our target audience: the primary advantage and uniqueness of BaseWalk’s Taskfit PRO solution compared to other task management, time and document tracking or productivity software lies in the simple idea that people working towards achieving a goal (we call this a task or an activity) should separate their activities from each other. On top of that, Taskfit PRO helps keeping the focus and save time, therefore, it helps earn more money. Whether it is large enterprises that use Taskfit Enterprise for business process improvement or SMEs, freelancers who use Taskfit PRO or Business for effortless working time administration and better productivity, they can all benefit from the strong built-in support for electronic collaboration, which has become an indispensable part of work in the past decade. Apart from seamless supervision, using Taskfit PRO results in 9% savings on working hours, and it helps individuals to become more productive and better focused.
Our product is meant to have an overall impact on personal productivity. Time and task management software are spreading fast among office workers as all of them suffer from the extra burden originating from working on several tasks simultaneously. Our Taskfitters community page is the collecting hub for relevant and interesting pieces and articles on the costs of multitasking, achieving productivity, conquering distractions or time tracking that we are offering the ultimate solution to by means of launching Taskfit to a wider audience. We are also revealing product related news and updates to the public on this community channel.

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