During the past 10 months, we have been interviewing our existing customers and collecting a wealth of information about how they use Zoined and what benefits they are especially fond of.
It turns out that all the customers are empowered to run their operations in a more lean fashion than before they used Zoined. Read on to see the three key benefits Zoined analytics can provide that enable Lean operations for our customers.
You have probably heard of Lean methodologies. Quick recap: At the core of Lean thinking are the elimination of wasteful actions that do not create any value to the customers, continuous improvement through experiments and learning, and empowering all stakeholders to initiate improvements and experiment.
PDCA cycle (aka PDSA cycle, Deming’s cycle, Shewhart’s cycle) – A lean thinking tool that helps with continuous improvement. Image source: Wikimedia commons
Reports, comparisons, and correlation analysis out of the box
Zoined provides hundreds of relevant reports out of the box. We found out that our customers are using the reports library in various ways, and the common denominator is that no one has to use the time to develop the reports. Everything can be delivered automatically for example in daily emails, and more advanced variations of the delivered reports are just a couple of clicks away on Zoined dashboard. Constant availability of up-to-date data removes waiting times and report development time.
Faster feedback loop
Our customers used to run reports for example once per week. The reporting frequency was mostly dictated by the availability of personnel to create the reports, and partly because of the limited value the reports seemed to provide.
Zoined enables significantly faster feedback loops with zero report preparation effort. Our customers can check their reports daily or even near real time and draw conclusions. When the time between the operational events and the report being available is shorter, also the personnel is more engaged to view the reports and draw the right conclusions. That’s why we see the usage of Zoined quickly pick up in any organisation that has rolled out our service.
Distributed innovation for improvements
The last, but not the least, of the three enablers, is the ability to share not only the reports but also the advanced analytics dashboard to everyone who might benefit from visual and numeric feedback about his, her, their team’s and unit’s performance. This happens by sharing information to everyone, all teams being able to set up their own experiments, and quickly check the results from Zoined’s reports.
Summary
So, although our customers were not using any lean terminology when telling us how they benefit from Zoined analytics, when we compared the various case studies we captured from them, we realized our SaaS analytics solution enabled all of the customers to operate according to the Lean thinking, which in turn gave them the agility and competitive advantage they so much needed to succeed in today’s competitive environment.
About the author
Tom Weckström is a humanist by heart, an engineer by education, and a change agent by profession. He is the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Zoined.