Ensuring Daily Management AND the Health Of Your Business

If you’re like most people, you’re well aware of the benefits of exercise. You also probably have a myriad of health and fitness goals. Maybe you want to lose a few pounds, lower your cholesterol, or even train to run your first marathon. You know that reaching these goals won’t happen overnight. You’ve got to work at it daily. And a regular exercise program is the way to get there.

Still, despite the promise of better health or crossing the finish line, getting started is a struggle for many of us. Maybe it’s because we don’t have the right equipment or resources. Or because we simply don’t have a plan or know what we need to do first. Discover three operations management essentials to keep in mind to effectively execute on, and achieve, hourly and daily targets that align with year-end goals.

Taking the first steps toward better business performance

The same is true of programs designed to get your business operations in better shape. You may be fully aware of the advantages of a daily management software, like the capabilities within Dploy Solutions KPI Management. You may buy into the fact that a daily management approach is the key to improving performance and staying on track every day to ultimately reach your annual goals.

But you’re not sure how to align your organization around the discipline of daily management, or exactly what you will need to ensure the system’s success.  Or, your organization may not have a management system (or process) in place that incorporates the daily management discipline fit for your operations.

Of course, as with fitness goals, having a coach or trainer to walk you through the process can be a huge help. Our business execution software, Dploy Solutions, and consultants fills that role for many of our clients who are looking to better manage their process and accelerate execution.

Here are a few of the steps we help them take to ensure a smoother and more successful adoption of our KPI Management software:

4 Steps for Getting Started with Daily Management

1. Get your leaders on board.

   A daily management approach with technology is going to dramatically change the way your business operates. It promotes full accountability and transparency into business performance and who is doing (or not doing) what to keep the business on track. Your top leaders are going to be excited about this unprecedented line of sight into their operations. But, understandably, some people won’t be immediately comfortable with this type of visibility.
   That’s why it’s imperative for your top leaders to embrace the idea of daily management full heartedly and to do their part to communicate the advantages to everyone on the team. With management’s support, team members, once involved in the process, will become more effective and efficient in their roles. And they will learn to take ownership and take pride in the productivity gains.

2. Analyze your existing data capture systems and make a plan for integrating them.

   You may already be keeping tabs on some key performance indicators for your business. But like many organizations, that data likely come from disparate systems, such as your ERP, MES, or CMMS. You may also receive spreadsheets from your accounting team, maintenance department, or other areas of the business.

   All of these sources of information are important. But when they come at you from all different directions and in different formats, it’s hard to see the big picture. Furthermore, by the time you receive and analyze the data, it’s likely too late to do anything about it.

   The beauty of a daily management system, like Dploy Solutions KPI Management, is the ability to aggregate and consolidate data from disparate sources in near real time, and to transform all that data into one easy-to-access, easy-to-understand source of truth. We work with our clients to help them determine 1.) What they need to measure to drive the performance they want; 2.) Where the data is coming from; and 3.) How to seamlessly bring it all together into one system for a single point of view on what’s happening in the business right now.

3. Formulate escalation processes and tie them to the databases that underlie the entire system.

   Combining a daily management system with the delivery of real-time business performance data will immediately alert the team when things are going off-course. When this occurs, the system helps ensure the right people know about the problem, at the right time, so the situation can be corrected and the business can get back on track and still meet its daily goals.

   We help our clients figure out this escalation plan for communicating each type of miss up the chain of command. And we help them determine the appropriate timeframe for getting more people involved in the solution.  So, for example, imagine that a mechanical failure stalls a production line, putting that shift’s goals in jeopardy. We can help clients configure their daily management system so that the supervisor is notified immediately in this type of an event. But if the supervisor fails to resolve the problem in 15 minutes, then the maintenance manager gets an alert. And so on up the line until the problem is resolved

   By establishing these escalation processes as part of the daily management system, we help our clients think through and put into action the best approach to effective issue resolution.

4. Provide training for everyone.

   For your investment in a daily management system to pay off, you need to make sure your people know how to fully leverage the system and get them comfortable using it. This isn’t just about getting people familiar with the user interface, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s also about getting people into the habit of identifying misses and immediately working together to find solutions and implement fixes. This sort of cultural shift goes a lot better when people at all levels of the organization have the opportunity participate in onsite or online problem-solving and daily management training and coaching.

Get a head start

If you’re thinking about a daily management system, considering the four points above can help you put the pieces in place to realize the full advantage. To learn more about how a daily management approach with KPI Management software capabilities works together and the benefits you can expect for your business, download our new eGuide, The Key to Hitting AOP Goals? Data-Driven Daily Management.