Automated Solutions within a contemporary business organization is becoming an imperative. This is due to the paradoxical situation in which today’s managers find themselves. They receive more and more information, allowing them to make better decisions and improve their results. At the same time however, they are in a context in which the speed with which decisions are made has become a key strategic factor.

What is Meant By Business Automation?

The above phenomena are capable of generating a new competitive advantage for the company. It is also noted that companies operate in an increasingly changing environment, so speeding up the decision-making process allows them to adapt more flexibly to these changes. This is only possible through Automated solutions.

What Can I Automate in My Business?

The capacity of the human being to process information is limited; if we exceed it, we will cause the individual’s response rate and performance to drop due to an information overload situation.

Control panels or Dashboards is an Automated Solution for organizations, and a tool that allows them to manage the company’s strategy. It includes those indicators and metrics that report on the level of contribution of people to business objectives, and have a direct link to the mission of the company.

What Are the Benefits of Automating Business Processes?

The Gartner Consultant defines Dashboard in its glossary of terms as follows:

1. Dashboards are a reporting mechanism that aggregate and display metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling them to be examined at a glance by all manner of users before further exploration via additional business analytics (BA) tools.
2. Dashboards help improve decision making by revealing and communicating in-context insight into business performance, displaying KPIs or business metrics using intuitive visualization, including charts, dials, gauges and “traffic lights” that indicate the progress of KPIs toward defined targets.
3. The objective of the Dashboards is to facilitate decision-making and highlight those areas of the business on which to act in order to obtain or exceed the expected results.

To get more value out of using automated solutions, make sure you all speak the same language and call things by the same name. Sometimes we use terms like goals, objectives, indicators to refer to the same thing and in others we use them to refer to different ideas. Before designing an automated solutions control panel, it is necessary that the people involved (analysts, managers or panel receivers, IT, consulting …) meet to define what elements are going to be shown and what their meaning is. It is about reducing the ambiguity that may arise around certain concepts.

What Considerations Are Needed For Effective Business Solutions?

• Any Control Panel is designed to meet the information needs of a specific person. In other words, any Dashboard has a recipient who is responsible for acting on the information received.
• Every Dashboard must reveal in advance the deviations that occur with respect to the planned objectives, so that the manager can decide what corrective actions are appropriate and have enough time to carry them out.
• The Automated Solutions will only include indicators that provide relevant information with which to act on certain business variables. If the information provided by an indicator does not allow action to be taken, it should not be included in the Dashboard as it will not be useful.
• The dashboard must be directly interpretable and understandable by the recipient. In other words, the information must be presented in a simple format and using the appropriate terminology.
• You should include strategy changes as they are approved. Any significant change in the company’s mission will be referred to the different existing Dashboards, in order to follow up on the new objectives.
• The incentive system should be defined with the help of the Control Panel so that people are also aligned with the strategy.

It is convenient that the different Dashboards or Automated Solutions of the company synthesize all their information by means of an overall score for each panel. To do this, the various indicators will be weighted, and a value will be obtained that will reflect the overall performance of the recipient.

The conclusions obtained through the Automated Solutions depend directly on the level of accuracy with which the analyst has selected the statistical techniques to obtain the values that make up the panel. For this reason, it is advisable to use metrics and KPIs that are easy to calculate and avoid, as far as possible, the use of complex metrics that is more a hindrance than an enabler for the Automated Solutions.