Why should your company start monitoring business indicators in real time?
No! Excel is not dead and will continue to be used for a long time as the best option for construction and draft of worksheets and reports tab. However, its use will no longer be accepted by the business area as a valid report for indicators.
… Hmmm, I don’t quite get it!
Facing the market need to become increasingly competitive, a company’s business area requires indicators in real time about everything that happens in the organization. The analysis of data from the past will continue to exist, however the demands for real-time data will be increasingly present in companies.
The flow of information that gets lost within the organizations is huge. However, more and more tools are emerging that are able to get this data and transform them into usable information for decision-making processes.
We’ve had several experiences with several clients from different sectors, in which we turn indicators that were tabulated manually into excel spreadsheets to dashboards with data that can be updated in real time. The difference in the management of the two scenarios is extremely significant. While analyzing consolidated data from the past a great amount of time is lost interpreting and giving meaning to information, enabling the possibility to have relevant information hidden intentionally or due to human errors, viewing data in real-time enables an early decision to be made, at a time when problems occur and allowing preventive actions that can be implemented in time.
In this article we are not going to talk about technical issues, but rather explain how the slowness in the systems and applications impact the end of your business. In addition, we are going to highlight the relevance of presenting business data dashboards in a format built to make decisions.
We could get any vertical to use as an example of how the impact on users generates financial losses for your company:
A virtual store, an area of customer service, a self-service portal or a web system, they all have a series of technologies that support them. In an analogy, it would be like a pipeline of a city. Although no one can see when walking the streets, if a problem occurs the impact is too great on everyone. For your company’s business it means financial loss and damage to your image. Manage all this in real time with automatic alarms and notifications sent directly to the responsible ones becomes indispensable to an organization committed to the productivity and satisfaction of its customers.
A dashboard built for an operating room of one of our partners to monitor the communication links of a Cowboy Festival in the city of Barretos.
Why is it important to monitor the indicators of business processes?
With systems that are increasingly more complex and competitive markets, companies need to ensure they have an advantage in their business compared to their competitors. One of the paths leading to a process of continuous quality and pursuit of excellence is to be able to take control of your processes through monitoring of key critical business indicators, in order to proactively take actions to avoid financial losses or waste.
Let’s illustrate this with two examples being the first of them, the monitoring of an online sales process.
A company that does not monitor its purchasing process in a virtual store may be failing to sell and failing to understand why they are having financial losses. In order to complete a sale on the site, at least the three questions below are essential:
1. The site has to be running and enabling the access to the shop online
2. The response time of the site has to be of less than 1 second.
3. The value of the product + shipping has to be competitive to face the competition.
If we are to have these three questions to be true 24/7, including holidays and weekends, it is necessary to monitor the entire infrastructure that underpins the operation of online sales as well as simulate the consumers experience when making a purchase on the site. Without it, your company may be losing sales for the competition and you didn’t even know you could be bringing greater revenue for your organization.
The second example is the monitoring of a network of shops. Following the concept that we have to be more competitive, do things differently and have an advantage before the competition in the current technological and economic market, a necessity of the organizations is to be able to take actions in an agile way according to its financial performance by product and by store. Monitoring these indicators automatically and in real time and viewing them minute by minute, can assist in the strategic guidelines without too great of an effort to build electronic spreadsheets.
Financial Dashboard
Business monitoring in real time!
To map a sales process online it is vital to find out which systems and equipment are necessary for the sale to be completed, since the request until the purchase order. Probably the ERP systems, CRM systems, databases, sales platforms, credit card systems, electronic invoices, internet links, servers, among others, will be mapped.
If one of these items does not work correctly, the online shopping process will fail and the company will lose money on foregone sales. After the mapping of this process, the status of all these vital resources to the business could be monitored in real time and displayed in dashboards. In case of problems, the person responsible for the system or equipment (internal staff or supplier) will be alarmed at the exact moment when the error happens, by SMS or e-mail. This way, in addition to not losing money with system failures, the area of technology and business can more clearly show all your IT resources that influence sales. It is also possible to measure investments in an increasingly assertive way.
“The technology decision maker that can’t speak the language of business is doomed to obsolescence!”
The end of the excel spreadsheet!
Having indicators and reports in real time and with automatic scheduling is essential to ensure maximum productivity from your staff. Using data from the past and that are not automatically updated by the minute does not match the good management practices in the area of business and technology.
OpServices can be your strategic partner in conducting the monitoring automation of your business processes through indicators with OpMon.
