The importance of managing indicators for your company

Even the best products and services don’t support a company by itself. That is, you can market something that is very attractive to your target audience, but it takes a lot more to keep a business thriving. Therefore, the administrative knowledge is fundamental, since they have useful and efficient tools.

Among them, the management of indicators is extremely important to know if your company is going the right way and, if not, what can be done to get the business back on track. The point is that while offering quality products and services is imperative to the success of your business, it is not enough.

Other companies may also have the same quality in what they offer, noting that fierce competition is a reality of the vast majority of sectors of the economy. In this way, it is necessary to know the market, the target audience, know where to sell, how to sell and, above all, what are the objectives of your company.

It is no use having the mission written on a sign hanging on the wall of the office or the company’s website; it is essential that all employees are aware of the goal and know how to achieve the proposed goals. It is in this context that the indicators enter, being that they refer to the numbers that can be used to measure the performance of your business in the market.

With these indicators in hand, it is possible to manage them, that is, to make decisions based on what they indicate. From this, a decision is never a shot in the dark, because it is given through concrete data, without considerations or intuitions.

What are the indicators in a company

The indicators in a company are data that can be raised, helping in its administration, since it shows how its operations are happening. There are many types of indicators and for each company it may be interesting to measure more specifically some of them.

To better understand, check out some of the key indicators in a business:

  • Productivity Indicators
  • Indicators of productive capacity
  • Process performance indicators
  • Quality Indicators
  • Indicators of effectiveness
  • Profitability Indicators
  • Strategic indicators
  • Competitiveness Indicators

All these indicators refer to the data of a company that can be obtained through surveys, reports and other forms, allowing a deeper and more detailed evaluation of their performance in the field of activity in which it is inserted.

Often a company starts selling a number of units per month that seems sufficient, but as time passes they realize that it is not, and the company starts to lose market for example.

Similarly, the entrepreneur believes that the time a product takes to be manufactured is adequate, but not when the accounts are made and the time spent in relation to its cost is calculated. These are just a few examples of issues that are often erroneously assessed because the indicators are not used.

How to measure indicators

In a small business, the flow of daily information is likely to be quite large. So, you may wonder, but after all, how to measure the indicators? That is, how did you gather a lot of information? I mean, it is possible, but it would take a lot of time, would not it?

No, if this is done with the help of an online management system that, in addition to making the work of the team more dynamic, by allowing tasks to be simplified and better controlled, it also has tools to measure the company’s important numbers. By measuring indicators, through reports and other resources, more assertive decisions can be made.

In addition, there are software that has advanced functions to measure the indicators needed, helping the company’s management to create a strategic plan to more effectively achieve its goals. It is worth saying that to create a successful business plan it is indispensable to master all the data of a company.

Thus, it is necessary to know how much the company invoices, how much is spent on production, what are the other costs, such as raw material value, hands of works, etc. With full control of these and many other information, you can not only make the best decisions but also follow your progress and always be ready for the necessary adjustments.

About the guest author:

GestãoClick is a company specialized in offering business management software to managers who wish to make their employees’ routine more efficient. Click here and learn more about what technology can do for your business.

The biggest mistakes in indicators definition

Avoid the biggest mistakes in defining business metrics

Defining business indicators in a conscious way is fundamental to be able to analyze the business objectively. It’s essential that the indicators can show managers solutions in order to correct errors and implement new strategies. There is still much difficulty in defining indicators and in this article we present the biggest mistakes that happen when it comes time to decide what indicators we are going to analyze.

Wrong monitoring solutions

The team that has responsibility for choosing management software often has no enough knowledge of the real needs of the users of these tools. Therefore, the people who should choose the most appropriate software are the managers themselves because they are the ones who know in detail the problems they face daily. Increasingly, monitoring software is simple and intuitive, allowing anyone, even without technical knowledge, to understand how it works.

Using Excel as an indicator management platform

Excel is probably the most widely used tool in the world in business and it’s appreciated for presenting a simple interface to perform some much-used functions such as calculations and spreadsheets. However, Excel has weaknesses that reside in the quality and consistency of the information generated. Excel’s manual processes are very likely to fail. Therefore, it’s necessary to reduce the manual work done in Excel. Excel should be looked at as a data viewer and not as an information generator.

Look at database as the solution to all problems

Databases are a key part of many analytical systems, but shouldn’t be regarded as the solution to all information problems. Databases shouldn’t be deployed before analyzing in detail the actual needs of the organization. To avoid this error, it’s necessary to identify the best method of integration and to know the access to information.

Acquiring management products for general analysis

When the business has no specific objectives, any tool is useless because it will be useful only if you can analyze the business in an integrated way. Business monitoring software should be applied when the organization is aware of its real needs and when it knows which indicators should be analyzed to improve its performance.