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Gathering data and using Tallyfy analytics for insights

Letting data guide your improvements

Effective process improvement isn’t about guesswork; it’s about making informed decisions based on facts. Data provides these facts, helping you understand how your processes are truly performing, identify where the real problems lie, and measure the impact of any changes you make.

Why data is essential for process improvement

  • Manages by Fact: Data replaces assumptions and opinions with objective evidence.
  • Identifies Real Problems: Helps distinguish symptoms from root causes.
  • Baselines Performance: You need to know where you are to measure how far you’ve come.
  • Pinpoints Bottlenecks: Shows where work gets stuck or takes too long.
  • Measures Impact: Validates whether improvements have had the desired effect.

What data should you collect?

For office and service processes, your data collection should align with your Critical to Quality (CTQ) requirements (what your customers value) and overall process performance. Consider two main types of measures:

  • Output Measures (Y variables): These reflect the results or outcomes of your process. Examples include:
    • Customer satisfaction scores (e.g., NPS, CSAT)
    • Error rates or defect counts (e.g., number of incorrect invoices)
    • On-time delivery percentage
    • Total process completion time (cycle time)
  • Process Measures (X variables): These are in-process metrics that can influence the output measures. Examples include:
    • Time taken for individual steps
    • Rework rates at specific points
    • Queue or waiting times between steps
    • Number of approvals required

A simple Data Collection Plan can be helpful, even if it’s just a basic checklist answering: What data to collect? Why is it important? How will it be collected? When/how often? Where in the process? Who is responsible?

Introducing Tallyfy Analytics: Your built-in data source

Manually collecting process data can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Tallyfy Pro simplifies this significantly with its built-in Analytics features.

Tallyfy automatically captures a wealth of data as your processes run, including:

  • Task Completion Times: How long each step actually takes.
  • Overall Process Duration: The total end-to-end time for each instance of a process.
  • User Workload and Performance: Insights into how tasks are distributed and completed by team members.
  • Overdue Tasks: Highlights tasks and processes falling behind schedule.
  • Step-by-Step Bottlenecks: Identifies where work is consistently slowing down.

Using Tallyfy Analytics to find improvement opportunities

By regularly reviewing your Tallyfy Analytics dashboard, you can gain actionable insights:

  • Identify Bottlenecks: Spot steps that consistently take longer than others. This is a prime area for investigation – why is this step slow? Can it be simplified, resourced differently, or automated?
  • Track Cycle Times: Monitor the average time it takes to complete entire processes. If cycle times are increasing or are highly variable, it signals a need for improvement.
  • Monitor On-Time Completion: See if processes and individual tasks are meeting their deadlines. High rates of overdue tasks point to issues with workload, complexity, or unrealistic deadlines.
  • Understand Workload Distribution: Identify if certain team members are consistently overloaded, which can lead to delays and burnout. This might suggest a need to reassign tasks or redesign parts of the process.

Visualizing data for clearer insights

Raw numbers can be hard to interpret. Visualizing data through charts and graphs makes trends, patterns, and outliers much clearer. While Tallyfy Analytics provides its own dashboards, understanding basic visualization concepts is helpful:

  • Run Charts: Plotting a metric (like task completion time) over time can reveal trends (is it getting better or worse?) or seasonal patterns.
  • Pareto Charts: Helps identify the “vital few” causes of a problem (e.g., the 20% of error types that cause 80% of the rework).

Data from Tallyfy (e.g., a high number of tasks frequently getting stuck at one particular step, or numerous comments indicating confusion there) acts as a strong signal, pinpointing exactly where a process might need simplification, clearer instructions, additional resources, or a complete rethink.

While Tallyfy provides significant out-of-the-box analytics, you can also export process data for more advanced analysis in other tools if your needs are highly specific. However, for most day-to-day process improvement in office environments, Tallyfy Analytics offers a powerful and accessible starting point.

How To > Improve processes effectively

Organizations can continuously enhance their operations by gathering team feedback analyzing customer input identifying bottlenecks through data and implementing changes systematically while maintaining focus on delivering customer value through standardized yet flexible processes.
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