No 'rocket science' required and available now!
In the previous post on the topic of Practice Performance, we talked about modern automation tools that can analyse, collate, rank, and present data on-demand and 'at the press of a button', and how these are now well within economic reach for small and medium business for the first time.
I stated, 'Embedded as part of your Practice Performance Analysis and Reporting and working with accurate and up to date data, such tools offer business insights to work ON your business that can improve or transform it. '
Now for some explanation and examples of what these tools offer.
'Out of sight' but a required part of the toolset is a two-way Integrator to link and extract data from your practice management and business systems and also update those systems. Access to the extracted data, stored in a Data Warehouse tool in the Cloud, is via a Business Intelligence (BI) tool that analyses, sorts, calculates, collates, and presents data. The only part of the toolset visible to you is the BI elements that enable you to choose data to appear on your screen. For example, a selector to view data by Office or Partner or Client or some combination. BI lets you specify the Period(s) for the data you want to access and the order in which you wish to view it. Also, Charts and Drill-down and Ranking of data and more things of that kind. The BI tool presents the data to you on a screen or in a report.
The above is as 'technical' an explanation as the business user of this type of system should ever need to get. Examples of BI outputs are:
This chart shows critical trends, for example, Work in Progress (WIP). If the Practice has a focus on reducing WIP by billing Clients earlier, yet the trend is for WIP to remain high or even inclrease, this may indicate a requirement for more work ON the business to reduce WIP.
Are the Practice's policies on managing WIP well defined? Are they clear to all involved? Is everyone following the policies? Does someone need counselling on the policies and ways to manage their WIP?
The above Chart illustrates the 80/20 rule (Pareto), which holds that 80% of desired outcomes result from 20% of the contributors to the result.
It shows Billed, WO (write-offs), and WIP (work in progress) by Partner (Ranked) in Dollars, and the same for the Practice Departments, and Employees.
And the same by Client.
The correlations can be revealing.
Drill-down into any information on the Chart can shed more light on particular performance issues.
The same Chart is available on a mobile device, on-demand 24/7. Teams can collaborate to improve results across locations and time zones.
'At the press of a button', Partners and Managers can access current Billed, WIP, WO data to work ON the business as mentioned above. That includes local or online Team/Member coaching while things are fresh in mind to have maximum impact.
A Practice can recoup its investment in setting up and using Practice Performance automation tools on an economical subscription basis very quickly.
Even just the savings in time to produce a 'Board Pack' can most likely justify the investment.
Regards
Peter Vroom
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