Challenge
ALIGNING OPERATIONS WITH STRATEGIC GOALS
Many of our clients are looking for a better way to align day-to-day operations with their organization’s strategic goals. But even when long-term goals have been translated into clear operational objectives and KPI’s that reflect their business, clients still find it difficult to monitor and publicize performance metrics in order to encourage the organisation to act where necessary.
Part of their challenge is to cope with the sheer diversity of KPI’s (revenue growth, profit, quality metrics, employee turnover, marketing campaign effectiveness, …), and connecting them to the related data sets available throughout the company. Once this has been accomplished, the next challenge arises immediately: converting data into succinct and actionable information.
Approach
IMPLEMENTING TRANSPARENT COMMUNICATION
Communication is one of the most important, yet often overlooked, aspects of KPI’s. Any of our projects therefore starts with a number of workshops to clearly understand our client’s strategic goals and their vision on how to achieve them. These workshops typically involve senior management, as well as management of various departments (including IT), with whom we collaborate closely to uncover what is essential.
Only then do we start developing a solution that is tailored to our client’s short-term and long-term needs. We build this solution on our CrossCheck framework, which is based on Tableau Online (an analytics cloud platform). CrossCheck comes with a ready-to-use data model and easy-to-read visualizations and dashboards that make it possible to set up a transparent communication towards all stakeholders.
Because we understand only too well that KPI’s require employee buy-in to serve a clients’ long- and short-term needs, we spend time and effort to work with the people from sales, marketing, customer service, production, administration, ... with whom we share information on KPI’s throughout our CrossCheck-based implementation.
Impact
GIVING A SENSE OF DIRECTION BY DELIVERING SMART SIMPLICITY
The live visualizations and dashboards produced by CrossCheck deliver what some of our clients like to call “smart simplicity”: clear, relevant and easily digestible information on their progress towards the realization of strategic objectives, with all the underlying complexity hidden from the end users. These dashboards maximize the chance for information to be picked up by all stakeholders and help to identify the areas where action is required to improve performance. We’ve seen these dashboards even inspire team spirit among clients’ employees. That’s because they invite people to evaluate how they work, and to learn from each other.
Time and again, we see that the biggest impact of any CrossCheck implementation is to provide employees with a proper sense of direction. Dashboards document where the organization stands with respect to short-term and long-term objectives, and make it easy to break down KPI’s and monitor progress over time for every department.