See The Moving Parts in Your Business with GoCanvas Business Insights
Introduction: Your data is talking to you – or trying to.
Every day, small and medium-sized businesses generate large amounts of data. Data on customers, inventory, sales, equipment status, and more. Data that could — if it were properly organized and analyzed — yield all sorts of information to assist in decision-making. But because that data is often locked away on paper, the insights from that data too often go untapped.
Fortunately, getting a full picture from your data doesn’t require a large IT staff or advanced technological skills. With GoCanvas Business Insights, you can gain new understanding from your data without a huge team of computer programmers, and put the same power of “business intelligence”— previously reserved for “the big guys”— to work for you.
Businesses small and large are tapping into the power of mobile forms and data analysis to dramatically improve day-to-day operations and strategic planning.
If you start listening to your data, you could be surprised at what it can tell you.
Are You Having These Issues?
Are you running into these common problems faced by many small and medium-sized businesses? Either you’re constantly struggling to find data you need, because it’s stuffed in an overflowing filing cabinet, or your business lacks that data at all: The information is too cumbersome to collect and process, so staff aren’t even gathering data beyond a bare minimum.
Or, you may have multiple versions of the same documents, leading to uncertainty about what’s really accurate. All this leads to a lack of understanding of where your business units are at any given time: Is the sales department over- or underperforming compared to this time last year? Is marketing failing to reach a major sector of your business audience?
If this sounds familiar, don’t despair. You are probably among the many small- and medium-sized businesses that struggle with the same issues. These problems stem from not using the power of everyday mobile technology and not coordinating how data is collected and shared.
Gartner, a leading technology research and advisory company, says that the average employee at a small- or medium-sized business still prints 400 pages a month. Many SMBs still collect data using paper forms. And even among those that have transitioned to a mobile app to capture information on the field, many aren’t mining this data to its full advantage.
To take full advantage of the data, you need to do something with it.
Case Study 1: Inventory Management
Like many companies of its size, Environmental Lighting Services, a 100-person lighting and electrical contractor based in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has an exceedingly complex inventory. In addition to all its warehouses, the company has 40 trucks, each of which is a “rolling warehouse” filled with a handful of each type of bulb it supplies. Since the trucks don’t carry full cases, employees performing the company’s semi-annual inventory couldn’t scan barcodes; instead, they were forced to count items manually, one by one.
Now, using the GoCanvas App it automatically populates with ELS’s master item list, employees can easily call up any item and enter in the count and location, reducing a time-consuming, three-week process to under one week.
ELS is preparing to unlock business insights through GoCanvas Business Insights, especially around inventory and forecasting sales.
Having an app-based inventory solution also makes external audits a breeze, and ELS has big plans to do even more. In addition to adding a timecard app and an app that assists technicians with energy-efficient lighting surveys, ELS is preparing to unlock business insights through GoCanvas Business Insights, especially around inventory and forecasting sales.
Company vice president Fred Wolsleger explains, “We’ve done two inventories, one at the end of 2015 and one mid-year 2016. As we approach this year-end, we will have one fiscal accounting year cycle that we’ll have gone through. Now, we’ll be able to do more analytical work. But if we didn’t have all that data in GoCanvas, it would have been impossible.”
Switching to mobile offers some immediate benefits — providing a high level of data integrity, for example, and saving time that would be spent rekeying paper forms into the computer. But to take full advantage of the data, you need to do something with it.
GoCanvas Business Insights makes it easy to import data into Excel to quickly generate charts, graphs, and summaries of your most important information.
We selected Excel because most businesses use the program and people are familiar with how it works. Also, no need to pay exorbitant costs for custom software at $1,000 per screen (something we hear a lot).
After importing your data, it’s easy to see, at a glance, the crucial data that helps you make business decisions. Which employees are charging the most overtime? Who are the most productive? Which equipment has been safety checked? What equipment fails most often, and why? The possibilities are endless and that’s the power of business intelligence (BI).
It’s easy to see, at a glance, the crucial data that helps you make business decisions.
What is Business Intelligence?
Simply, “business intelligence” refers to summarizing the data you capture in the course of doing business, then taking that information and transforming it into easy-to-read charts and graphs to gain insights into your company’s performance.
Originally — in fact even just five years ago — only Fortune 500 enterprises could afford the pricey and complicated tools used to perform this mining and analysis. Today, these tools are within the reach of many small- and medium-sized businesses, and they are much easier to use than ever before.
According to industry expert Dresner Advisory Services, a third of small businesses and more than 20 percent of mid-sized businesses have used BI products in the past three to five years. For good reason: A study by IBM and MIT Sloan found that analytics-and business-intelligence-driven companies outperform their peers by 2.2 times.
Business intelligence software — including GoCanvas Business Insights — can help with:
- Understanding which pieces of equipment are involved in most breakdowns or incidents.
- Targeting the top safety issues by location.
- Aligning daily operations with strategic, long-term objectives.
- Establishing and monitoring performance metrics.
- Identifying customers who are cutting back on their purchasing and offering them incentives.
- Comparing year-to-date expenses for this year with last year, and forecasting sales for the entire year.
- Learning which category yields the most “immediate action” ratings, by the supervisor.
The Power of GoCanvas Business Insights
Let’s say you’re inspecting your store, work site, or piece of equipment regularly. One inspection by itself doesn’t tell you anything other than “This happened and this is what we did about it.” But the power of data is that information accrues over time. Once you have data from 10, 30, or 100 inspections, patterns begin to emerge, and you can start to be more proactive and less reactive.
For example, a dashboard allows you to analyze employees’ time cards. How many jobs is each employee completing per day or per week? How much time is each employee spending between jobs? Which employees are the most/least productive?
The power of data is that information accrues over time.
Inspections
In any industry, safety is priority number one. Inspection checklists can yield insights on whether any machine is in need of upcoming service and even predict failures before they happen — which can prevent injury, reduce downtime, and help you better plan for future repairs.
Think data can’t predict the future? A team at Carnegie Mellon University — the same group that helped IBM build the Watson supercomputer — built a predictive safety model that is 80 to 97 percent accurate. The model uses a company’s preceding three months of safety inspection data to predict where injuries will occur over the next 30 days.
Software like this is making its way out of the lab now and into the palm of your hand — in your employees’ mobile phones.
Simply tracking your inspections (what happened, when, and what was done to address it) over time gives you access to a wealth of information you wouldn’t have if each inspection existed in a vacuum. You can look for patterns. If a pattern emerges, you know it’s not a matter of if an incident will occur but when. Then you can take steps to fix the problem before someone gets hurt.
Whether it’s an issue with set-up or on-the-job work, you can identify patterns through your inspection data and improve your safety culture.
Case Study 2: Connecting the team
Bernhard Energy is all about saving its clients money and energy.
The Little Rock, Ark.-based firm assesses and designs energy-saving mechanical and HVAC equipment for institutional clients like hospitals and universities. That’s good news for clients and good news for the planet.
These big, complex projects always start with a survey of existing equipment. Bernhard uses the GoCanvas App and checklist to survey all the equipment already at the site, noting size, age, and state of repair, and supplementing the textual data with photographs. The company’s technicians are able to easily note areas where clients can save money by looking for and documenting where mechanical equipment uses outdated methods of operation, and where that equipment could be upgraded to use more efficient parts and systems.
Bernhard uses the GoCanvas App and checklist to survey all the equipment already at the site, noting size, age, and state of repair, and supplementing the data with photographs.
Back in the home office, staff members use GoCanvas Business Insights to import all that data into Excel. “GoCanvas helps quite a bit” to get the information into a usable format, says energy analyst Michael Wenneker.
That data then goes to multiple departments: The engineering team uses the data to model the viability of a project; the financial team models future maintenance costs, and so on. It’s truly a team effort, with GoCanvas uniting everyone at Bernhard.
Timecards, overtime, productivity, and more: Your people may be your best asset but they’re also one of the most complex.
Construction, manufacturing, and field service businesses — as well as businesses in many other industries — may have employees distributed over multiple locations, some who never even visit a home office but instead work from the road. These businesses often have a combination of full-time, part-time, and contract employees, all of whom fill in different time cards each week.
GoCanvas allows you to take that mishmash of paper time cards and invoices and streamline the data into one app, where it can be processed by your back office.
And even better: Once timecard data is in GoCanvas, it can easily be imported to Excel using GoCanvas Business Insights, where you can perform complex analysis. Find your most productive employees, or identify the ones taking the most sick days. Learn which employees are working the most overtime and why. Combine timecard data with GPS data to determine which jobs take the most time and if you are billing accordingly.
Once timecard data is in GoCanvas, it can easily be exported to Excel.
Finance departments can use GoCanvas Business Insights to help fine-tune budgets, forecast sales, and more, but they can’t do it without good data.
One manufacturer said that prior to implementing business intelligence solutions, its finance department spent 80 percent of its time collecting data and 20 percent analyzing it; after the switch, those percentages were reversed.
With more data being more accessible, businesses are able to react more nimbly. “Ten years ago, we made assumptions on samples of data and based decisions on gut feel or someone’s ability to argue an opinion,” one financial director said in a report by research firm TDWI. Now, that’s changed because you have access to real-time actual data with the click of a button.
Case Study 3: Saving time
Another company making the most of its data is MOM Brands (formerly Malt-O-Meal). MOM has been a GoCanvas user since 2010. It outfits its in-store auditors with iPads to collect data at all the stores in which MOM Brands products are sold. These auditors track how each item’s brand standards are being upheld and whether products are placed where they are supposed to be. The auditors also ensure there is full compliance with distribution and retail standards.
MOM Brands now can pull all that data into monthly pivot table views at the click of a button, allowing its team to receive visual documents in real time. Users can reference historical data, segregate data, and even pre-populate form fields on their iPads before going out to a site visit at a retail partner location. MOM’s more than 100 users are saving countless hours, now that data that previously took days to analyze is accessible immediately; and the fact that data is transmitted directly from the field to Excel means fewer errors, and hours saved not doing data entry.
You may be thinking: This all sounds great, but won’t it take a long time and cost a fortune?
Not at all. Most GoCanvas customers using GoCanvas Business Insights get up and running by themselves. But if you want a bit of extra help, our Professional Services Team is on hand to guide you through the process and get GoCanvas Business Insights up and running.
Our team can:
- Customize the GoCanvas App for your needs
- Integrate your GoCanvas App(s) with GoCanvas Business Insights
- Identify insights you can get from your data and help you with a custom dashboard
What’s more, you’ll find that the modest cost of GoCanvas is more than offset by the time and money you’ll save.
Imagine: No more hours spent on manual data entry or manually converting data from one format to another. No more errors due to typos or mis-keys. You can stop spending time chasing down faulty data or painstakingly creating dashboards and visualizations, and start focusing on what’s really important — running a successful business.
Ready to Rethink How You Work?
GoCanvas has helped a variety of businesses across multiple industries transform their safety processes and rethink their efficiency, ultimately saving them money. Why not do the same? Reach out to one of our experts today to kickstart your process revolution.
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