Understanding the different data streams of your business and workforce is key to driving growth and profit.
Delving into your data is a must for any business hoping to achieve growth, success and profit. Data comes from everywhere. From the financials, to the hours worked, to customer demographics – you can find data for almost any element you can think of and there are various metrics used to measure it.
Take Google Analytics. You can see where a visitor to your website comes from, what they do when they’re on your site, how they engage with you…you can even assign a monetary value to each visit to ascertain an average worth.
Data is everywhere and it is growing all the time. According to IBM 90% percent of the data available in the world today was created in just the past two years.
As server capacity and processing speeds increase so does the facility for data capture. There’s now over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data captured each day. A quintillion is a billion billions or a 1 with 18 zeros after it.
So why capture all this data? What does big data give to us that we haven’t had before?
The key driver behind this is getting an instant snapshot of what is happening in your business or ‘knowing the now.’
Knowledge is the cornerstone of understanding. And better understanding of your business will allow you to make timely, informed decisions that benefit your business.
Previously we’ve used data to see what happened, to analyse previous events. Now we can use it to see what is happening in real-time. To analyse what is happening right now. To save money, save time and to increase productivity.
Collecting data through workforce management software
The best workforce management systems connect all your relevant data together and help you make the best decisions for your business – both in the immediate short term and in the long term. Because all of this is automated it greatly reduces the time it takes you to respond to an unforeseen event – like an unplanned absence.
What if your business could be more profitable by consistently over-staffing? By always being over-staffed you will mitigate the impact of any absence. A workforce management system will tell you if your cost of the additional staff is less than the revenue you lose from ever being in a position where you’re understaffed.
It’s these kind of decisions that understanding big data lets you make. By being in a position to make these decision you are allowing yourself to do two things: reduce costs and increase revenue.
This, in theory, will see a rise in profit that is driven by a better understanding of the data that drives your business.