Business indicator analysis provides us with the guidance we need to set the course of the organization. Indicators help us to make well-informed decisions and without them we are adrift.

Mindful of this need, AuraPortal has added Universal watcher to the Neon Business Intelligence toolkit.

Armed with this tool, management teams can create their own indicator reports, set alerts and notifications to monitor the progress of projects, ensuring that they always have the information they need to make the right decisions.

Today, companies need to constantly measure their progress (or lack of) in real time. They need to have an overview of everything that is happening, so that they can adapt their actions accordingly. If not, it would be like driving an airplane without the dashboard. Knowing where we are and whether our expectations are being met is fundamental to our success in adapting to the market.

What is an indicator?

“Data or information that serves to know or evaluate the characteristics and intensity of an event, or to determine its future evolution”.

In order to assess the performance of an organization, we need to have detailed information on the progress of the operations. Indicators provide us with this information.

It is important that indicators provide us with the information we need. Just as a doctor does not make random measurements but focuses on key indicators such as blood pressure, heart rate, or body mass index, organizations must know what data they need to support their decision making.

For this reason, performance indicators should be focused on strategic objectives and provide the information that decision makers need to consider. It is therefore essential to identify the key performance questions for each strategic objective and to define the KPIs that will support them.

Why we need indicators

We use the indicators to evaluate to what extent, or to what degree, the objectives we have set in an organization are being met.

In general, indicators should fulfil the following functions:

• Represent a unit of measurement to evaluate whether we are achieving the goals and objectives established by the organization.

• Provide information about the efficacy of any area within the company and ensure that they are meeting their targets.

• Detect and foresee deviations in meeting objectives.

An indicator is a comparison between two or more types of data that serves to produce a quantitative measure or a qualitative observation.

In short, indicators are very useful instruments because they allow us to evaluate different aspects of our business like the degree of completion of an objective, or level of customer satisfaction.

Universal Watcher

Universal Watcher is a functionality of AuraPortal specifically designed to assist decision makers, as it allows direct and instant access to critical information about the organization’s processes, without interfering with the operation. In process management, it is essential to establish indicators to measure, evaluate and review the processes involved.

An indicator is a measurement associated with a value that allows a continuous and periodic evaluation of a specific characteristic (result, development of an activity, degree of satisfaction, etc). To achieve this assessment, what we do is compare the value or, characteristic that we want to analyse over different periods to see its evolution and draw a conclusion.

What, where and when in real-time

The Universal Watcher wizard allows you to retrieve information about events and data relevant to process execution, as well as setting conditions alarms and warning notifications.

To create visual reports with Universal Watcher, no technical knowledge or database management is required. We can create as many reports as necessary to obtain the information that will help us with our decision making, for example:

• Instant knowledge of the cost aggregation generated by a personal task or between two stages in a process

• To be informed at a specific time each working day about which processes in the company are progressing well and which processes are suffering delays

• Receiving a notification if any supplier within the sales network is too slow following up on sales leads compared to a benchmark, or when their success rate is below average.

• Receive a warning if the temperature of a furnace in the manufacturing process is approaching its maximum limits

• Automatically inform customers about the status of their orders at different stages of the process.

• All these situations, and many more, are easily answered with fast response times using the AuraPortal Universal Watcher.

What makes Universal Watcher different from other practices?

Unlike other queries, which only show real-time information, Universal watcher allows us to retrieve data recorded at a specific time and store it over a period.

In order to not affect the performance of the platform, limits will be established, by days or numbers of records, which can be stored in the system. The moment these are exceeded, records will be overwritten.

Practical example

Let’s imagine, a company that plans to make a large investment in infrastructure. Due to the costs involved, the company manager initially wants to control all material expenses while at the same time receiving notifications about the most expensive orders.

The company has already created a “Purchase Request” process that could be modified to meet these specifications, but as this control is only going to be temporary it would be a waste of time and effort, so instead we will use Universal Watcher to retrieve all the necessary information.

Creating a report with Universal watcher

So, the first thing we’re going to do is create a report to show us the information we need to monitor, including costs, and the time spent between application and approval of purchases.

We will add the fields we want to check and set up alerts and notifications to keep us informed if certain established conditions are exceeded. For example, we can set an alert that sends a notification to our mobile phone if products are purchased for more than 200 USD.

We can add mathematical formulas if we want our report to show calculated values. For example, we want it to show the price of an item including tax.

Another very useful element offered by Universal Watcher is the possibility of knowing the execution times of a task. In this example, it would certainly be useful to know the time it takes to approve a purchase request. Or better yet, that an alert is sent out if it takes longer than a certain amount of time to approve or reject the application approval task.

Like other cases we could add conditions so that this value would only be shown in the report if these conditions are met.

Add Recipient

It is very important to emphasize that with Universal Watcher the recipients of the notifications can be established, and that these can be sent to an AuraPortal task, e-mail, or even to our mobile device with the “Instant workflow” app.

Interpretation of results

When we access the report, we can see different lines showing the results of each execution of the “Purchase Request” process.

In this image we can see that values appear in red because the following conditions have been met:

• Price. Any purchase request worth more than USD 200.

• Approval time (hours). Approval times take more than two hours.

Immediate alert notification

In the image below we can see an example of a notification where we are notified that the limit of 200 USD for acquisitions has been exceeded.

Notification of data transmission

Lastly, it is worth mentioning that you can configure the settings so that notifications are sent every time a certain task is executed. In this case, we may set this up so that we are notified each time a purchase request is approved.

In addition, we can also set conditions so that notifications are only sent if the amount is greater than a certain amount, or if it has taken a long time to resolve the request.

In the notification image we can see that the alert has appeared due to the two established conditions: the price has exceeded 200 USD and the request has taken more than two hours to be approved.

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