As a company steeped in data and automation, we love exploring how this can help us drive efficiency and uncover new opportunities every day.
At Qflow, I have seen data drive and shape our businesses for the better in many ways. I group these into two broad categories:
- When data can help you work more efficiently through day-to-day tasks, with less pain.
- When data can spark a conversation you weren’t previously having.
The first is perhaps the most obvious. We use data to identify the ‘low hanging fruit’ and automation to tackle it at scale. For example; one of our customers uses information exported by the Qflow API to accelerate their supplier payments process. Once they have confirmation (in the form of the digitised delivery note) that the goods for a given purchase order have been received, they can release payment of the corresponding invoice. Through data, they identified the key bottle-neck (verifying a material had arrived on site) and through automation, the endless game of pass-the-parcel is eliminated and nothing gets stuck for ages in someone’s inbox.
This is data giving the operational side of your business a tune-up.
Beyond driving efficiency, data can unlock otherwise unseen opportunities, strategic insights and huge business and customer value. At Qflow we practice what we preach, and use data to try to understand how well we are meeting our customers’ needs. Important and useful conversations between Qflowers have been triggered by the product usage and AI performance data. The conversations brought together people from different parts of the business, and helped them to move the company closer to our goals. So many times we’ve looked at our internal data and thought “Huh, that looks odd…I wonder what’s behind that”, which got us thinking, and discussing and collaborating to find incredible solutions to problems we weren’t previously aware of. In short, data can spark conversations you weren’t previously having.
Data doesn’t have much value sat in a filing cabinet, but put it to work and it can be a tool to take away operational pain, and unlock valuable insights and collaboration.
