3 ways to maximize business process visibility

Ever had that moment of panic when you can’t find your phone, only to realize you’re holding it? Or couldn’t locate the car keys that were hanging on the hook in front of you? Then you’ve experienced a mental scotoma or blind spot.

Drawing its name from a medical condition that involves literal loss of vision, we can all sometimes fail to see what’s right in front of us through inattention, distraction or outright disbelief.

In business a similar experience can result in serious consequences. Failing to identify breakdowns in processes or flaws in operational protocols could mean anything from lost sales opportunities to catastrophic safety failures and public relations disasters. Seeing the state of our operations clearly is vital to successfully maintaining a profitable business.

Take a close look at your organization’s process platform. No one would argue that aesthetics are a substitute for quality process content, but without a clear and effective user interface (UI) and a well-organized dashboard of core information, the significance of your process data could easily be lost to a software scotoma.

Your UI needs three key elements to make sure you don’t have any crippling data blind spots.

Identify vital business questions and the data needed to answer them

Not everything captured by your process platform is going to be of equal importance for your users. The increased use of advanced AI tools allows for ever-more-granular analysis and reporting, but those details are not necessarily the first things your users will be looking for.

What are the leading questions they will be asking at management level, or on the workshop floor? What are the key drivers for those users from a process perspective? That’s the information that should be presented cleanly and clearly on their dashboards. Make it personal – start with a sense of the processes that directly relate to them, and the process actions that need their attention.

Ensure alignment to real needs by enabling personalization

While key questions are going to be central to most of your users, there will also be a significant diversity of interest in other elements. That’s where users need to be able to customize their dashboards according to their needs.

At a management level, cost and time reporting may be a primary concern, with highlights on process suggestions or breakdowns. Operational staff might be more inclined to focus on processes they’re practically handling and progress within those tasks and will benefit from alerts about process updates that will change their day-to-day procedures.

Allowing users to add the most relevant content to their dashboards not only makes the process platform a more useful tool for your teams, it is more likely that they will interact with the tool regularly.

Insights must be accessible and understandable

Even with all the relevant data available, if it is indecipherable it won’t help your organization thrive. This is where the user in User Interface needs to be considered. Dashboards should be clear and informative. A wall of text is going to obscure what matters, and complex acronyms or business-speak will only confuse or frustrate your frontline staff.

Make sure your dashboard uses easy-to-read graphics to depict key statistics, and follows established conventions like ‘green = good, red = danger’ that will make comprehension quick and simple. Make sure the language you employ is simple, direct, and accessible to those you expect to read it. The easier it is for your teams to grasp the content quickly and clearly, the higher your chances of effective compliance are.

It’s easy to swamp staff with information, and leave them dazed and confused. A poorly presented process platform could contain essential business data that never gets seen, simply because the UI and layers of content create an unintentional blind spot.

What you see when you look at your organization’s process platform actually matters. With a well-designed user dashboard that makes vital data available, your process platform can be a portal to increased efficiency, effectiveness and profitability.