Left hand not talking to the right?

Data is everywhere.

Literally, everywhere you look. The critical question is how much of it you are gathering, and how you are harnessing it to your advantage.

Well-known examples of this are your Facebooks and Googles of this world. They are ahead of the pack because of their ability to take your data, harness it, and sell it, that's what they do. Spoiler: They don't care in the slightest about your trip to Spain, they care about what you engage with, your locations, and your interests, so you can be targeted by the companies that sell said McGuffins; travel agents, coffee shops, back support, whatever it is.

Now, you might say: "But I work in food production/I own a hotel/I work in facilities management, I am not Facebook or Google".

You are not wrong.

However, that does not mean for one second that there is any less data in your field, just that you do not utilise it for marketing companies. Instead, you can use the data for yourself.

A lot of companies have data they collect for regulatory purposes, payroll, and for sales. However, in our experience, what very few companies do is use that data to its potential.

Allow us to explain.

Data is everywhere, but by itself, it is pretty useless, or at least, cumbersome.

If your data comes in various forms, via separate means (various portals, logins, paper trails) which require a human to analyse and act on it, you have created some pretty big inefficiencies. Like our post on the aggregation of marginal gains, this is the same sort of thing.

Building business intelligence and automated workflows into your life can do wonders.

Imagine this:

• Monitor on you machine reports the temperature is too high
• Monitor automatically creates a job sheet and exception report to your maintenance team and sends a text to the duty manager
• Maintenance team are able to login remotely to diagnose, see that the job needs a human intervention
• Live time view (on the same screen) of where all engineers are
• Allocate
• Field engineer sees a full history of when it reported fault, what actions remote team taken
• If it is chargeable (3rd party) once completed all hours, parts used are collated and workflows generate a job to the accounts team to generate an invoice.
• Full audit trail held in the document repository and noted in the history of the machine for future maintenance reference.

All. From. One. Screen.

Nobody had to create a job, nobody had to get on the phone to see what had been done or check availability. Your customer has a full breakdown of what was done and how long it took.

How much time did that save? By letting the data work for you rather than just being collected by you, the game can change.

What about your business? Are you stuck with a lot of data from a lot of places? Are you trying to herd cats in your day-to-day operation? Hopefully, you can see that is not a great idea.