Santa Claus is Coming to Cloud

In order to more efficiently manage the millions of letters he receives from children, Santa is working with KnowledgeTree to implement a new cloud-based document management system. This will enable Santa to create a more streamlined work environment for his incredibly busy and merry teams of elves, and simplify what can be a chaotic toy specification, manufacture and delivery process. KnowledgeTree will contribute $1 for every letter to Santa uploaded between now and December 23, 2010 to the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

With child population (not to mention children’s expectations) reaching unprecedented heights, Santa needed a document management system to simplify the increasingly complex set of tasks he faces each year. Santa’s workflow includes reviewing the millions of letters he receives, compiling the naughty and nice lists, and managing the logistical processes that need to be completed by Christmas Eve in order to fulfill the wishes of children worldwide on Christmas Day. With the Big Day less than five weeks away, Saint Nick needed a system that did not require extensive training and could be accessed anytime and anywhere by members of his elf production, dispatch, and route optimization teams. With cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications providing these functionalities, a year’s worth of stress is alleviated for the man who works one day a year.

Beginning today, children from all over the world can send their letters to Santa via his dedicated “Letters to Santa” site (https://santa.knowledgetree.com). Once uploaded, these letters will be processed through the various approvals Santa has customized, which include a naughty/nice check, a toy making step, dimension specification check to assign toy delivery via the chimney or doorway, sleigh loading/reindeer readying process, and GPS mapping. Santa’s elves can complete their specified tasks – build toys or allocate coal – and push approvals down the line. Once he receives notification that the preceding workflow steps have been completed, Santa can check the lists twice and give the final approval before the toys are loaded onto the sleigh in the early evening hours of December 24, 2010.

“We’ve taken the North Pole into the cloud, and I couldn’t be happier,” said the plump, jolly, white-bearded man wearing his signature red coat with white collar and cuffs. “This job is hard and I’m not getting any younger, you know? While I will still visit with little boys and girls at parades, shopping malls, and department stores, I strongly encourage children to upload their letters to me online. From there, our new system will make easy work of what was turning into an incredibly daunting task – managing the millions of letters we received each year. Now the elves, the Missus and I are all on the same page. Collaborating with my staff through the cloud has saved time and energy, and by Christmas morning, shipping errors will have been drastically reduced, assuring smiles on children’s faces around the world.”

With the structured approval process made available by the cloud, mistakes are a thing of the past. “Sometimes the elves mistakenly would send Xbox games to kids with PlayStations,” Santa said. “Mistakes like those reflected poorly on our entire organization. But now the approval processes we have in place help us pay better attention to detail,” Santa remarked, jerking his head toward embattled elf, Buddy.

“While our typical customer works in finance, legal, or sales and marketing, Santa’s organizational challenges are no different or less demanding,” said Daniel Chalef, CEO of KnowledgeTree. “Anyone who has worked in an office knows the frustration of sharing documents with colleagues – let alone the millions Santa receives each year. Christmastime is the most wonderful time of the year, and we are very pleased to make the job a little easier for Santa.”

At press time, KnowledgeTree does not integrate with Santa’s innate ability to know which children are sleeping and awake, but R&D is hoping to unveil a product update prior to Thanksgiving 2011.

Watch a video interview with Chalef and Santa – http://www.knowledgetree.com/blog/santa-xmas-document-management-workflow

About KnowledgeTree
KnowledgeTree makes sharing content and controlling document processes simple with secure, affordable online document management solutions for growing SMBs and departments at larger companies. Designed for business professionals, KnowledgeTree is easy to use, does not require extensive training and enables content to be accessed and managed anytime, anywhere via cloud computing. Rich and open APIs allow for seamless integration of popular third party business applications.

KnowledgeTree accelerates return on investment by streamlining document-centric business processes and increasing collaboration with workflow, document alerts, version control and full transaction histories. KnowledgeTree is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information, visit www.knowledgetree.com. Follow us on Twitter @knowledgetreesw.