Meet agile reporting – decide without guessing
You’re wasting hours looking for data in emails and tables just to find out that the situation in you retail chain might be. After a tedious process of searching, it often turns out that the data you consider essential are not available or badly categorized. They need to be processed. Hours pass… Even if they are all out there, due to the differences in the logic under which they were stored it’s difficult to figure out answers to the most bothering questions. The time flies inevitably. When you finally arrive to conclusions you were aiming at and want to start acting, the situation in the retail chain will already been different. But different how?
There’s a simple way not to be bound to make decisions based on, for instance, trend data from the previous month – and making partial guesses. This way is agile reporting.
- Chunks of field data run down to a single point
- They are standardized
- They contain all the expected elements
- Thanks to a cohesive data organization system it is easy to provide all the team members with the constant access to relevant information
From the standpoint of people working with distributed teams, agile field reporting stands for acquiring high quality data, easier to use in the day-to-day decision-making. Owing to this, actions can be carried out instantly, corrections can be made – and new insights into the situation appear almost constantly.
Thanks to the agile reporting systems – such as cHow – the data become organizations’ foundation for all decision-making processes.
Cohesive data – no need for preprocessing
Effective reporting needs acquiring data in a form that’s ready for analysis. Let’s suppose we’re gathering information on a price of a certain product – it might happen that different people enter it in a different way, like 5.25, 5,25 or $5.25. If this happens, before starting any analysis, you need to spend a lot of time normalizing the data. To avoid that, all you need to do is to use a specialized question type in the reporting tool – the users will be forced to enter the data only in the desired form since no other will be accepted.
The data acquisition managers have a lot of question types at their disposal – be it for freeform answers, for preprogrammed choices, for pictures, for barcodes etc.
Avoiding logical errors
Using the question logic while creating the survey template allows for saving a lot of time usually spent on correcting the acquired information, often riddled with ordinary human errors. The user will be asked to provide answers according to the overall process logic stored within the system. For instance, if the product we’re asking for is not available, the system won’t ask the user to take its picture or enter its price. If the promotional action was not conducted at a particular location, we will not ask for it’s outcome.
Replacing the chaotic information sent over email or over instant messengers with a thought-over and intuitive reporting system allows for saving up to 75 to 90% of the time spent on preparing data for further analysis. The feedback arrived in a concise, ready to use form.
Real time data
When using agile reporting, the data used by the managers to assess the situation in the retail chain, faithfully reflect the reality. Considering the dynamics of the market it is risky to make decisions based on the trends dating back to the last quarter or even the last month. Taking action based on the up-to-date information eliminates the inertia also in vast organizations.
Key event notifications
Notification system is a priceless helper tool for any manager. Even if, busy with everyday chores, we forget to visit the cHow dashboard to make sure there’s noting that would require immediate attention – properly configured alerts will arrive in the form of e-mail or push notifications.
Instant data availability
Deploying an agile reporting tool gives you the ability to make the acquired data available for all the designated parties in the organization within the matter of seconds. It is a crucial improvement over the process consisting of, i.e., taking a picture, sending it over to a computer, combining it with an Excel spreadsheet and sending over email to the manager, no sooner than a couple of hours after making a visit to a particular location. And this is just the first step – not even near the moment when the data is available for analysis in their entirety.
Targeted yet broad access to information
It often turns out that different departments withing the organization, when gathering some data for their own purposes, do not communicate them to other divisions so they can use them to power their own processes. Actions overlap, which generates additional costs. More often though, the decisions are being made without the sufficient information pool, by trusting experience, intuition and needs of a single department – without a broader context. An agile reporting system allows for managing large sets of small but crucial pieces of data to make them usable for a broader audience withing the organization. And this affects the quality of decisions all across the board.
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