photo credit: Robert S. Donovan
Dashboards (What is a Digital/Executive Dashboard?) provide significant advantages (4 Advantages to Dashboards) to businesses in terms of efficiency and use of existing systems.
A very valuable addition to your efficient business is what I will refer to as an intelligent alert system.
There are really 5 key reasons that alert systems are valuable:
- they are threshold-based
- they trigger action
- they can be easily maintained
- they allow passive monitoring
- they never sleep.
Threshold Based
By utilizing thresholds your company can set a threshold value that sends alerts before actual problems exist.
Scenario: You know that a 30 widgets go out the door every week and you know that it takes 2 weeks to replenish them.
Solution: Your alert system could send out alerts when the inventory shows less that 60 or 65 so you know to place the next order. You could also set an alert if the count falls below 40 so that you know to verify that the shipment is on-time.
By creating threshold based alerts your system can be active in monitoring and reporting issues. By sending the alert the system can trigger action to occur and act as a trigger point.
Workflow notification/Trigger point
Business workflows are such an important part of efficient business. The alerting system can integrate into this model extremely effectively. When alerts are generated by the thresholds they can trigger other things to occur. This can either be done by sending emails to specific groups/people or by notifying other workflow systems of the alert.
Scenario: The production department needs 3 boxes of a specific widget and are waiting for them to be delivered to the warehouse.
Solution 1: An alert is created so when the inventory system sees that there are at least 3 boxes in inventory, it can alert the Production Department so they can get the necessary items to complete their tasks.
Solution 2: The other option would be that the alert could trigger the production management system to schedule the delivery of the boxes from the warehouse and place the project on production schedule for the following day.
It is important that the system is very customizable and maintainable in order to be able to fit into the day to day operations and workflows.
Customizable and maintainable
Alert systems should always have the ability to be easily customized and maintained. What I mean is that they need to easily accept new thresholds and allow people to modify the thresholds. In the example of the production department waiting on the widgets, they would need to be able to easily create a threshold alert so they knew when the items were available. This could either be done manually through the alert management system or automatically through the production management system that would be integrated to create alerts.
By making it simple to create new alerts it allows your resources to worry about other tasks and have the system monitor for them. It allows your resources to not have to actively monitor their systems.
Passive monitoring
With an alert system in place, your resources can focus on their jobs instead of the system. The system will alert them when there are things that need their attention so they can work on higher priority items knowing that the monitoring responsibilities are handled. This creates a much more efficient business structure where people can be more productive.
Also, the systems don’t need sleep every night. So instead of either closing down your business over night or having someone watch the systems at night the monitors are on 24/7.
24/7 Resource
In many businesses, business doesn’t stop at 5 PM. With the Internet providing access all over the world, many small businesses are even global. An intelligent alerting system can help you in this respect. If your order system is automated and can accept orders anytime of the day does that mean someone has to be there in case something goes wrong? Not with an alerting mechanism. If you set up your alerts to notify you of serious problems in the evening, all you will need is a device that can accept a message. The alerting system will keep an eye on things and let you know if any problems occur.
Alert!! - Summary
By utilizing intelligent alerting systems you can make your business more efficient. It can be the resource that keeps an eye on things for you and lets your resources do the other things that need to get done. By watching out for issues the system can allow systems to work more efficiently and then flag people when intervention is required.
We can help you build a dashboard and intelligent alerting that will make your business more efficient and profitable. Leave us a note!
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