24/7 Software Blog

You strive to be a proactive leader.

You spend countless hours recruiting and developing your staff.

It's your top priority to train the best team members in the world.

You want to be the best.

You want them to be the best.

But, that's not always easy.

The operations environment changes all the time.

No matter how well you train them, you always feel like you're behind the eight ball.

You struggle to get your team where they should be because criminals and technology evolve at a fast pace.

Faster than you.

Are you overwhelmed by the demands of your role?

We'd be surprised if you don't have any sort of anxiety.

You have many responsibilities, and the pressure to perform is high.

But, what if you could ignite the potential of your employees?

What if the inefficiency isn't a result of their abilities but a mere indication that you need to recognize a significant deficiency?

Keep reading; we're going to discuss a fundamental principle that could change everything about your operation: data.

Then, we're going to explain why you need operations management software to incite your understanding of your operation.

Last night’s event had you scrambling.

Your team responded to one incident call after another.

No one had any downtime.

About 100,000 people attended this year’s motocross show. Dirt, ramps, and professionals flying in the air on dirt bikes.

Who wouldn’t want to participate, right?

For your customers, it was a night they will never forget.

You’re just glad it’s over.

Now, it’s 5 AM Monday morning.

You always get to your office early these days to prepare for the Monday morning calls.

You start scouring through your office.

You’re looking for the stack of incident files from last night’s event.

The executives always want a snapshot of the previous week’s events.

It’s not too bad, but it’s been a real struggle to get all the information, so you’ve been dropping the ball lately.

You cannot afford to lose it again.

They need the number of incidents, customer requests, injuries, medical evacuations, fights, and ejections.

They’re known to throw some tough questions at you from time to time.

You’re running on empty because of last night, and this might be the final straw for you if you don’t find the files you need.

You already “misplaced” incident reports in the past.

You’re out of excuses.

“Where are last night’s documents,” you scream down the hall.

Everyone looks at you, and your operations coordinator, Tyler, responds, “Everything is in your office.”

But, you only see the remnants of a couple of files from customer services’ reports.

It appears that Housekeeping saw the files stacked near your trash pile.

Everything is gone.

You panic because you know you’re going to be taken out like the trash too.

It is 9 AM.

Time for your call.

You have nothing, and your job is on the line.

How does this make you feel? Could this have been prevented?

Yes.

2018 is fast approaching; less than a week away!

Now, you’ve got to find out how fast your team performed all year.

It’ll help you identify what improvements or changes are needed in 2018.

How’s your operation doing?

Are you responding to issues and incidents efficiently and effectively?

Do you have the right amount of resources available?

How are your staffing levels?

Is it time to invest in operations management software?

You need to answer these questions.

But, you’re probably asking yourself, how? Agree?

Don’t stress about it; we’ll save you the guesswork.

You need to use analytics.

You need the ability to capture data (hopefully lots of it) that results in valuable analytics.

Are you in a position to rely on your data? Can you trust it?

You need to close out 2017 and get ready for 2018.

There’s no better day to start than today!

“A big waste of money or the engine of marketplace innovation? That's how some people see basic scientific research. Now a new study shows how basic research and inventions are connected,” according to Joe Palca’s recent All Things Considered podcast on NPR entitled “New Study Highlights Strong Link Between Basic Research And Inventions.”

All Things Considered host, Robert Siegel, explains in the opening comments of the report that “Scientific research can seem abstract or esoteric. But with time, it may turn out to have practical value. A recent study has uncovered a strong link between basic research and inventions that can be brought to the market.”

Palca first asks in the article, “What does the rideshare company Uber have to do with the research of a 19th-century German mathematician named Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann?”

He continues that “Benjamin Jones can tell you. Jones is an economist at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.”

According to Palca, Jones “and a colleague decided to make a more systematic study of how connected basic research was to future patented inventions. They looked at 4.8 million patents issued by the U.S. Patent Office and 32 million scientific papers. They focused on papers that had been cited by at least one other scientist.”

What do you think their findings told them? Would you say that even some basic research could lead to innovation?

Your security team is tasked with conducting guard tours.

We’re talking about a property that covers 100,000+ square feet, multiple entryways, and as many restricted areas as Area 51.

You’re not securing extraterrestrials.

But, there’s no doubt your team is keeping busy. We also know it never ends.

Answer this truthfully:

Does your guard tour system give you the accuracy and efficiency needed to do your job most effectively?

If you’re not sure, that’s OK.

Keep reading, because we’re going to give you the insight you need to choose the right guard tour system for your facility.

“Science relies on the careful collection and analysis of facts. Science also benefits from human judgment, but that intuition isn't necessarily reliable. A study finds that scientists did a poor job forecasting whether a successful experiment would work on a second try,” writes Richard Harris in their recent NPR article entitled “Scientists Are Not So Hot At Predicting Which Cancer Studies Will Succeed.”

According to Harris’s article, “That matters, because scientists can waste a lot of time if they read the results from another lab and eagerly chase after bum leads.”

"There are lots of different candidates for drugs you might develop or different for research programs you might want to invest in. What you want is a way to discriminate between those investments that are going to pay off down the road, and those that are just going to fizzle," says Jonathan Kimmelman, an associate professor of biomedical ethics at McGill University in Montreal, in the NPR piece.

“Kimmelman has been studying scientific forecasting for that reason. He realized he had a unique opening when other researchers announced a multi-million dollar project to replicate dozens of high-profile cancer experiments. It's called the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology. Organizers have written down the exact protocols they would be using and promised not to deviate,” Harris continues.

Harris notes in their NPR article, "This was really an extraordinary opportunity,’ according to Kimmelman because so often scientists change their experiment as they go along, so it's hard to know whether a poor forecast was simply because the experiment had changed along the way.”

Now, while you’re not forecasting results of cancer studies, we found a lesson to be learned here.

Do you see it?