If you’ve ever used a Fitbit or an Apple Watch to help you reach your fitness goals, then you know a little something about how motivating and helpful it can be to have a constant view of how you’re doing toward reaching those goals. Instead of waiting until the end of the day to let you know whether you hit or missed your target, a smartwatch shows you where you stand right at the moment. So if it’s 3:00 p.m. and you’re still 6,000 steps shy of your daily goal, you still have time to take action—i.e. turn off the TV, get off the couch, and go for a walk—so you can hit your target and win the day.
And, as we like to tell our clients, winning the day puts you in a better position to win the week, the month, the quarter, and the year. In other words, by winning every day, you stay on track to reach your annual goal.
Organizations need help staying on track
In the business world, technology that supports daily management processes functions a lot like a Fitbit for organizations. Of course, a business is much more complex with more goals, key performance indicators (KPI) measurements, and more people involved than an individual trying to lose a few pounds. When businesses miss the day, it’s usually because:
- They don’t know they are off track until it’s too late to do anything about it.
- The people who can correct problems often aren’t notified in time.
- They don’t truly understand the reasons or root causes behind the misses.
An operations management software, with robust KPI Management capabilities, employs a combination of process rigor and technology that can help organizations resolve these challenges and give them their best shot at winning every day.
5 Ways to Win with a Daily Management Process
Here are five elements that operations management software with KPI Management brings to the table to help you better manage business performance on a daily, hourly, and even down-to-the-minute basis so you can win the day, and, ultimately, the year:
- Abnormality – A robust KPI Management tool introduces the discipline of abnormality tracking. Whether in a service center, factory or retail floor, or sales and marketing department, the person who experiences the issue—maybe it’s a mechanical failure on a production line or a phone line outage in a call center— immediately enters the problem.
- Escalation – A daily management process, integrated with Dploy Solutions KPI Management tool, uses tiered accountability and timed escalations to send that information up the chain of command to people who can address the issue at the right time. Different people at escalating levels are notified if and when the level below is unable to correct the issue in a pre-defined amount of time. Higher-level leaders are only notified or interrupted when they need to give their attention to a critical, unsolvable issue.
- Analysis – With tools for root cause analysis, the software prompts employees and managers to work together to identify the reasons behind the failures—what happened and why? They can then create action plans for immediately bringing resources to bear to course-correct and get the organization back on track to meet the day’s goals.
- Prevention – For issues that repeatedly cause major performance disruptions, Dploy Solutions goes beyond helping your team identify a quick fix. It provides problem-solving tools for identifying and creating countermeasures to be implemented to prevent similar disruptions or delays in the future and help ensure optimum long-term performance. In other words, it helps move your organization from constant fire fighting to fire prevention by resolving recurrent problems permanently.
- Visualization – Dploy Solutions KPI Management capabilities enables real-time data visualization. By using dashboards, it shows at a glance the issues that are hampering performance and what’s being done, by whom, to correct situations. This helps promote transparency and accountability at every level of the organization. In addition, better data collection, analysis, and visualization give mangers useful insight for analyzing trends and forecasting future outcomes.
Ready for your next win? If you really want to improve the way you manage your business on a daily basis, you need a system that, like a Fitbit, can help you know where you stand right now in terms of reaching your goals. So you can take action when needed to course-correct and stay on track. Remember, whether it’s weight loss or operational performance, the key to winning the year is winning the day. With the right daily management process and technology, people have the data and the tools they need in their jobs to ensure every day is a success.