Why You Need To Add Alerts To Your Ops Tech Stack now!
We all live in an extremely uncertain and volatile world where everything is ever-changing at a rapid pace. This applies even more so to the current business world in general and operations teams in particular where there’s almost always a brand new problem that they would be tackling, on any given day. Given this dynamic environment, it becomes almost impossible for your teams to stay on top of all the operations problems that your businesses face. Different organizations handle this problem differently ranging from -
- Acting Impromptu — Figuring out and acting on issues as and when things break in your business
- Strategizing with Reports — Prepare and plan your strategy based on your historic performance
- Monitoring with Dashboards — Continuously monitoring the KPIs to find out if things are breaking
- Being proactive with Alerts — Be notified when things break so that you can solve them proactively
Evidently, the more obsolete way among these four approaches is to Act Impromptu. As businesses scale up, this approach won’t work because your operations and outcomes become dependent on a lot of external factors. Given this uncertainty and complexity, it becomes extremely important that businesses try to address their issues more proactively. Here’s a brief comparison between use cases for Reports, Dashboards, and Alerts -
However, none of these approaches can solve the entirety of your problems. Each of them is used for a different purpose and all of them have a crucial part to play in how business decisions are taken. The ideal scenario would be where each of these approaches works under a feedback loop where the output of one helps you redefine the inputs for the other.
While Reports and Dashboards help you tackle long-term and medium-term problems, the major chunk of your problems would be in the short term given the volatile nature of the operations world. This is exactly why you need alerts that keep you in control of all your operations problems. Here are 5 reasons why we think your operations teams need Alerts -
1️. Operations teams are always fire-fighting
Something or the other always keeps breaking in the operations world. Your ops teams are constantly working towards putting these fires out. There’s too little time for them to think and reflect on what went wrong when and why. Given the overwhelming nature of freak incidents happening on a day-to-day basis, they need to be told when something goes wrong for them to work effectively.
2️. Why you cannot depend solely on Reports
Given the volatile market landscape in the current era, Reports are just not enough for you to stay proactive as things change too much, too fast. With Reports, you can only see the issues after the report is ready for that period; by then, it is too late for your teams to take corrective actions.
3️. Why Dashboards are just not enough
Although Dashboards give you real-time visibility into your business KPIs, you would still need to dedicate your team members’ bandwidth to keep a constant tab on these metrics. This not only has the possibility of human error but is also counterproductive as your teams, instead of monitoring dashboards continuously can dedicate their time to other important things where human intervention is required.
4️. Be proactive with Alerts
With Alerts, all you need to do is figure out the most important issue(s) that you anticipate could become a blocker for your business goals and set up conditions for the alert to trigger. Now, your teams can work on their day-to-day activities while the Alert tells you when something breaks or when a “Freak Incident”, as we’d like to call it, occurs. Then and only then do your teams need to worry about investigating the root cause and figuring out corrective actions to be implemented.
5️. How Alerts add value to your business
In conclusion, in the current day and age, none of these approaches could be used in silos to achieve your company goals at scale. Given the co-dependent nature of these approaches, any business with dynamic market conditions would need all of the following -
- Reports for defining your long-term strategic goals,
- Dashboards to monitor the progress toward those goals, and
- Alerts to make you proactive with real-time notifications on freak incidents
Consider the following business scenario for a company operating in the quick commerce market and see when and how Reports, Dashboards, and Alerts are useful -
Almost every business today maintains Dashboards to monitor various KPIs to track the progress toward their goals. But the improvement in your KPIs is directly dependent on how well you solve these freak incidents as and when they come and hence alerts become extremely crucial.
With this, we can understand how Alerts are almost indispensable for any business. If you are someone who owns a business that maintains Reports and Dashboards but is looking to empower your operations team with the superpower of being proactive with Alerts, look no further coz we at Locale made it our mission to become the modern control tower for your business and make your teams proactive!
Here’s a short glimpse of how easily you can set up alerts over any metric for your business on Locale with SQL queries as long as you have the right data.
Locale.ai empowers your operations teams by giving them the power to create their own alerts, track anomalies, and build a system of accountability. If you are eager to know more about how Locale helps you set up Alerts, Book a call with one of our specialists to have all your questions answered today!
Originally published at https://blog.locale.ai on August 23, 2022.
