SmartDraw Software Announces Solution to Improve Meeting Effectiveness

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, SmartDraw Software announced a new solution for businesses that want to significantly reduce the number of meetings and shorten their average length by more than 25%. Through the power of visual communication, SmartDraw's Visual Meetings makes planning and conducting meetings much more efficient and productive, therefore saving companies both time and money.

Visual Meetings leverages SmartDraw VP, the world's first visual processor™, to make the creation of visuals possible for everyone in real-time. For the first time, a visual project plan can be created and edited in a collaborative meeting environment. This allows more actionable work to be accomplished during the meeting, eliminating the seemingly endless cycle of revisions and follow-up.

Paul Stannard, CEO of SmartDraw Software, said, "Businesses can never have too much time – which is why time, in all aspects of business, is so vastly important. And meetings can be one of the biggest time wasters in any organization. Businesses that think, plan, manage and communicate visually are the ones that demonstrate how to recoup more time than those that don't. That's because visual communication should be easy, fast, flexible and universally understood – this is especially true when it comes to meetings."

Using real-time visuals for meeting preparation, presentation, information capture and follow-up can provide significant benefits to managers and allow them to get the most from their team members' valuable time.

SmartDraw's Visual Meetings Solution:

• Reduces average meeting time by more than 25%
• Helps teams achieve clarity and consensus faster
• Eliminates the seemingly endless cycle of revisions and follow-up meetings

Stannard adds, "Well-run meetings can be collaborative, efficient, productive and empowering. Unfortunately, most meetings are not well-run today because they are not planned well, they tend to get off topic, and the results are not immediately actionable. Time is wasted, and team members can lose interest and feel unengaged. The potential benefit of collaboration is lost. A solution such as SmartDraw's Visual Meetings that can shorten the length of the meeting cycle (planning and preparation, execution, and follow up) as well as capture real-time collaborative information in an easy-to-use visual format provides real, measurable return on investment for the companies that adopt it throughout their organization."

Learn more about Visual Meetings.

About SmartDraw Software

SmartDraw Software, LLC helps businesses increase their bottom line by improving communication, refining operations, completing projects on time, and successfully implementing their plans through the everyday use of visual communication. Publisher of SmartDraw VP, the world's first visual processor™, SmartDraw Software enables business professionals to easily and automatically create more than 70 types of common business visuals, including flowcharts, project charts, mind maps, org charts, timelines and more. SmartDraw lets anyone achieve professional-quality results in just minutes. SmartDraw is used by more than half of the Fortune 500, as well as thousands of law firms, police departments, health systems and private enterprises of all sizes. SmartDraw Software, LLC is privately-held, with headquarters in San Diego, California. For more information or to download a free trial of SmartDraw, please visit www.SmartDraw.com.

SOURCE SmartDraw Software, LLC