The term “indicator” suggests that it indicates, tells you, informs you… about something that is happening.
As a business owner, you want to know what is happening at all times, even if it is a weekend.
If you have to call one of your employees to find out what’s going on, you feel sorry.
If you have to tell a boss about what’s going on, you feel even more sorry.
What are they going to say? That you’re bothering them on their weekend off.
That is why there is nothing more valuable than being able to go to some tool that is not going to bother to inform you: your laptop or your phone.
Without having to ask any person, (who may even lie to you), today you can use automatic notifications to be informed, continuously, regardless of the date or time it is.
You already receive a lot of notifications from social networks and from other businesses.
But from your business, how can you know what is happening?
Since you handle matters that are unique to your business, it is easy to say: “I want to put a lot of alarms to work that sound when something happens from which I have to make a decision.”
For example, knowing if the stock of flour is already below 10 kilos, knowing which supplier brought me the invoice more than 20 days ago, detecting that there are more than 5 customers complaining about the quality of the cakes in the 23rd street store…. Anyway.
How do you set those alarms to work?
Design your indicators
The solution starts by first designing some good variables that take value from data that you can collect.
One of the most repeated mistakes in business is trying to put any variable as an indicator.
So, you ask for loads of reports from the computer scientists, full of figures, which don’t tell you anything. They don’t allow you to make any decision, unless you want to kick everyone out of that department, which spends a lot of paper and a lot of money on technology.
On the other hand, if the variable you want to monitor is good, but you can’t get it from the data that is recorded from the operations, you won’t get what you want so much: being able to let your employees rest, being able to “see without asking”, and better: provide your bosses with information so they can make decisions without having to ask you.
In summary, we conclude that two requirements are important in the design and operation of indicators for a business:
The indicator must give a measure of performance, report progress, and be able to draw trends from its values. It is not just any variable in a tabular report, full of rows of data that you have to review for hours to know what is happening.
The indicator must automatically take values from the data recorded about your operations, and exceptionally measure relationships between your business data and other external sources, such as the population density of each city where you have a store, or the number of products of the same type that your competitors sell, compared to yours, in a certain territory.
What does FINLAZ offer?
In the book you will find, in its Chapter 4, proposals for indicators to measure performance in any type of business.
Those indicators meet the above requirements. They are explained in a simple way, and from their understanding, you will be able to adapt them to your business.
What follows is to put them into practice, so that you are always well informed, at all times, anywhere, and that your business runs with the least number of interruptions possible.
Success and to study. These are times to reflect and be creative.
You should not spend any resources for fun, you have to innovate based on your own knowledge.
We are here to help you.
Oh, and after having the alarms, comes automation: automatically paying certain suppliers (supplier selection criteria can be set), ordering flour from certain figures in your inventory, getting more information about the store where there are more than 5 clients complaining… this is infinite.
But you have to adapt to these times of speed.
Be careful, because you must learn to invest. We also share about it in FINLAZ.
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