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How Analytics Can Help You Boost Your Productivity 

03-02-2018 01:25 AM

Productivity is one of the things that can make a business sink or swim, and often, the answers to how you – either as an organization or an individual worker – can become more productive are not as clear-cut as you would hope. It can be hard to establish where time is being lost, where things could potentially be unnecessary in a working process, and where whole ways of working may need to be overhauled to drive productivity upward. Or at least, it is if you don’t have the right data or know how to use it.

Data analysis can reveal all kinds of secrets about how you or your company are doing things more slowly or with more waste than would be possible with some simple changes, and this is why either working with a management analyst or learning analysis skills in relation to business yourself can give you a huge boost.

What Data Should You Be Gathering And Analyzing?

When it comes to collecting data within a business, the real rule of thumb is that the more data you can get on just about anything, the better, with the caveat that the methods needed to collect the data shouldn’t outweigh the potential benefits of having it. Fortunately, a lot of data is simply handed to you, for instance, customer data, staffing data, logistics data, traffic data for your website and sales data, and so the real first step here is to understand how to store and manage this data in the best way to be able to analyze it more easily. This will vary depending on what type of business you are, but as a hint, it is never paper records, and it is almost always databases, whether these are databases within software, bespoke to the type of data you are using, or databases you actually design in-house for your own analysis needs.

Actively Collecting More Data

Other data you may find useful, you may have to have a strategy to collect. This can include things like staff and customer satisfaction data. When designing surveys or other methods to get this kind of data, always be conscious of doing it with efficient processes that reduce the need for manual data entry, and also leave you with a database of records that is easy to work with.

What Can You Spot When You Analyze Different Data?

Having data that you can easily sort is a good first step of the way, but analytics skills will be needed to identify what the data actually means. A statistics or management analytics expert will be able to filter, present and manipulate data in ways that can reveal different thing that you can then create actionable strategies to streamline. These can include bottlenecks in processes, seasonal productivity fluctuations and potential causes of them, and differences in productivity across different functional units or staff.

 

Whether you opt to use a professional management analyst or work on gaining these skills yourself, applying them can lead you to new ways to work smarter, and may even give you the eureka moment you need to solve your productivity problems!

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