Businesses have a problem. They need to deliver goods and services faster and with better quality than their competitors, in a more tightly regulated environment.
You can’t compromise on speed, quality, or compliance; there’s no cutting corners. Untangling the issue demands a fresh look at your business processes.
Depending on how you adapt, you could gain a serious competitive advantage. Let’s see how technology can help.
The demands of people and processes
Let’s start with what’s common to all businesses – the need for an organised methodology for managing people and processes. Ideally, this will do more than just maintain the status quo; it will ultimately boost operational efficiency.
We call our solution Connected Workflow Management. Others might describe it as task management, work management or operations management. In any case, the right approach should allow you to examine and improve processes by identifying strengths and weaknesses.
Achieving this takes data. Acquiring data means keeping detailed records of performance and being able to properly analyse them. Business have traditionally used paper records or basic spreadsheets to record key tasks within their workflow.
The problem with paper
This comes with its own set of problems. Paper records are hard to store and process at scale. They’re prone to damage, human error and even falsification.
Critically, they are notoriously difficult to use as a basis for analysis and reporting. Taking a deep look into operations based on paper records might typically happen during an annual review, taking days – if not weeks – to produce.
So, what happens if a big problem rears its head in the period between those reviews? You might register that something’s up, but you have limited ability to pinpoint where in your workflow the issue lies, short of waiting for the next review.
Many businesses aren’t even aware they have these problems. Those that are aware often consider these problems to be inevitable facts of life.
The digital solution
A digital Work Management solution, like Checkit, lets you track key tasks as they happen. Staff get prompted when work is due and input checks and tasks using either dedicated hardware or a smartphone app. The benefits are enormous.
Connected Workflow Management gives you certainty that routine checks and tasks are being carried out to schedule, viewable from one central dashboard.
You can see how staff react to issues. ‘X happened so we did Y’ is timestamped. Could that reactivity be optimised? Can improvements to best practice be spread to other sites? Now you know.
Equipment itself can be monitored 24/7, not just once or twice per shift. Accuracy is improved. Cloud storage removes the need for keeping reams and reams of paper on site. Human error and falsification are drastically reduced.
Of course, those big annual reviews are still vital elements of business intelligence, but the continuous data driving them can be pulled together in minutes, not weeks.
Much of this information is effectively unobtainable using pen and paper. Simply seeing whether or not something gets done pales in comparison to knowing exactly when, by who and to what standard.
Armed with the right tools, strategic operations management becomes possible at any time and at any scale.
The triple challenges of speed, quality, and compliance are overcome by the freedom to fine-tune processes, and the data to measure the effect.
