How to empower your team to make decisions

By empowering teams with actionable data, executives and managers enable their teams to make decisions that will increase sales, improve operational efficiency and become more effective. Sharing vital data with your employees will provide them with the knowledge to identify winning business strategies.

Give your team the right tools

Providing your team with great tools is well worth the investment in the long run. The right data tools are essential to a winning team as they boost productivity and empower effective decision-making. Top of the line business intelligence, like Phocas, enables your team to identify your top and bottom customers, compare sales over time, analyze trends to streamline your marketing efforts, and make data driven decisions.

Utilize dashboards

Dashboards allow you to set the business indicators that are important to your business. A good dashboard will provide a visual, fact-driven overview of the indicators most important to your team, enabling them to see at a glance how the team is performing. With Phocas, your team also has the ability to dive into the underlying data in the lightning fast grid that sits behind the dashboard. Non-technical people can quickly build an interactive, customized dashboard, so your team can collaborate, revise and print on the spot without help from IT.

Provide visualizations

Executives can decide how to make business improvements by using visualizations to identify opportunities in each area of the company. Your team can convert data to charts instantly, and share their findings as a bar, bullet, bubble, column, area, line, gauge, pie or a dual axis chart that animates when opening and filtering. Phocas offers the option to drill down into the data behind the images. Use heat maps and circle markers to make an outstanding impression.

Encourage collaboration

Rather than relying solely on reports, encourage your team to have discussions to assess issues from their individual perspectives. By encouraging collaboration, your team will come together to make the best possible decisions. Data driven collaboration enables your team to predict outcomes of current performances and identify opportunities.

Share reports

Sharing reports with your team provides one version of the truth for the whole team. Bookmark your favorite reports for your team’s review, schedule report alerts and automate report distribution. Reports can be scheduled to go out in an automated email before your regular weekly or fortnightly meeting. Your whole team benefits from having access to essential reports.

Measure KPIs and reduce administration work

Ingrid Vanlangenberg from Whiting Holdings (steel distributor) uses Phocas data analytics every day in her role as a Finance Project Manager. It allows her to dashboard and report on KPIs and easily make fast and accurate decisions by getting to the source of the data very quickly. The tool has allowed her finance team to spend less time on administration such as collating and cross checking reports which has reduced monthly reporting times from 10 to 5 days.

Get mobile

Provide your team with the ability to access real-time data, dashboards, and reports from wherever they are via their tablet or smartphone. Quality software solutions, like Phocas, are fully mobile and optimized for all types of devices including laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Having access to important information on the fly, enables your team members to make quick decisions based on one version of the truth.

Gamify your data

An efficient, yet fun, environment is essential to cultivating collaboration among team members. Individual team members may not take action on their own, but they become invested in doing so when they feel they are personally benefitting. By providing your team with an immersive and gamified experience, using data becomes engaging. If your team is able to manipulate data quickly and easily, they are driven to improve their performance through feedback. By introducing gamification, you can present a fun and competitive way for your team to detect every opportunity to increase revenue and overall productivity.