Look forward, not backward: steer your organization with real-time insights

A stand-up with your team every morning. The question that always comes back, "How are we doing?"
The answer lies somewhere in a spreadsheet, an HR system or with someone with a good memory. But what if you had that information in one place - current, organized and ready to send?

That's exactly what business intelligence is all about. With a module like Insights you work with your own data, in real time. No standard dashboard that draws everything out for you, but a flexible environment in which you decide what you want to see, how you present it and with whom you share it.

Insights: turning data into management information

Insights is not a pre-filled dashboard, but a data-driven workplace. You create your own reports based on the information most relevant to your organization. Whether it's absenteeism, labor costs, productivity or deployment versus realization - you have complete freedom to build, filter, store and automatically share reports.

Its power lies in its flexibility: you decide what insights you need, and how you want to present them. This not only gives you insight into what is happening, but also a grip on how you adjust.

What can you do with it? Some examples

Insights allow you to target themes that often don't become visible until late otherwise:

• Discover Absenteeism Trends
  Put departments or locations side by side and see where absenteeism is structurally rising. Not assumptions, but facts.
• Defensive forecasts check
  Compare planned deployment with realization. Where do you deviate structurally, and why?
• Track payroll costs from schedule to payout
  Map what you planned, what was actually worked and what was finally paid out.
• Benchmark on productivity
  Compare teams or locations on performance - for example, revenue per hour worked - and discover where improvement can be made.
• Create and share reports
  Build your own reports, save them, and make sure the right colleagues get timely access.
• Set and track goals
  You set the KPIs you think are important on your R&R dashboard. You decide who sees and follows which KPIs - from HR to site managers. This allows you to work in a focused and transparent way with the figures that matter.

What does it provide?

"We were able to increase our productivity by 2%. That may seem small, but on an annual basis it's huge."

"Every supermarket does have its own challenges. Insights shows exactly what knobs you can turn to address those issues."

It is often not the spectacular leaps, but rather the small, structural improvements that make the difference. With real-time reports, you see faster where you can make adjustments, and you work step by step on better performance.

Want to get more out of it? Follow the right training

Insights offers so many possibilities that it makes sense to become proficient in it.
Check out our training page, where we offer several training courses - including the specialized Insights training course - so you can make the most of all the functionality.

In this training you will learn, among other things:

• How to set up and customize your own reports
• What choices you can make in it in terms of filters, columns and display
• How to translate insights into concrete actions within your organization

That's how you extract value from your data faster and more purposefully - and turn insights into impact.

Finally

With Insights, you no longer work with outdated figures or gut feelings. You make choices based on current, relevant data - and thus manage your organization more sharply and effectively.

Reflection Question
When you make an important decision today: is it based on insight, or on feeling?

About the author Becca Ligthart

Becca Ligthart is a passionate marketing and communications professional who focuses on providing practical tips and fresh insights for the effective use of WFM in companies, with a strong focus on forward-thinking business operations.