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The importance of source-data and KPIs in your enterprise wireless ecosystems

Published by: SimplifyWireless

Our team here at Simplify Wireless loves data, and we qualify our actions by using custom KPIs to benchmark our performance. This helps us understand where we are, and where we want to go. It is one of the biggest drivers of change in our organization, and the organizations that we work with. **SPOILER ALERT:: it also tends to be one of the least utilized sets by a whole big number of enterprises that are wrestling with chaotic wireless ecosystems. **

Because we know how important KPIs are to BI and operational efficiency, one of our aims with our adoption partners is to have them be able to answer the below KPI questions easily, and we hope you can too. We believe that once you have visibility over your total costs and ecosystem data, you have the underlying baselines that will help you optimize and mange your system more effectively, and create good KPIs that can drive higher wireless ROI.
 
So, please take a moment and ask these three questions of yourself:
 
If you were able to easily answer the above, congratulations, you are on the path to success! If you were not, we have (exciting) work to do.

Why Data and KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are used to determine the effectiveness of an enterprise solution, in our case a wireless management solution.

Why should you aim to discover and use KPIs in your wireless management solution?


Because KPIs:

  1. foster performance management and assessment,

  2. tell you if you are on track, and if you are not , can point you in the right direction,

  3. can boost morale among your employees, and

  4. support and influence business/department objectives. 

For example, imagine one of your KPIs is the average in-use lifespan of a device; the industry average is 16 months, for our customers we hover around the 24 month benchmark. If you notice that a group of people are reporting broken cell phones that have a lifespan of less than your average, you can investigate why. Sometimes the “broken” cell phones happen right around the time a new iPhone is set to be released. Without a KPI for average in-use lifespan, you would have no visibility on this piece of the hardware allocation puzzle.
Given how important data and KPIs are to efficiency and operational optimization, let's ask a few more questions, this time pull-in your team, responsible for the wireless ecosystem.

  1. What KPIs do you have access to, and use ?

  2. Where is the data that is used to derive our KPIs coming from (straight from the source, or through a middle solution provider) ?

  3. How does our organization determine the effectiveness of our wireless management solution through these KPIs ?

  4. Are these KPIs working to help us assess our efficiency and optimization goals ? [How/Why Not?]

  5. What are some of the successes we have had through tracking these KPIs, and what has our data told us?

  6. Do our KPI data points and benchmarks lead back to a lower total cost of ownership (TOC) year-over-year ?

  7. What makes up our TOC for our wireless fleet (does it include carrier charges, hardware, systems and operational costs] ? 

These are all big questions to tackle, and ones that once you do - can help your organization start to embrace how wireless management data can impact your overall business revenu.
 
If the above questions are difficult to answer, and your team has little visibility into these types of inquiries - it's time to look at why, and if your MMS solution is up to the task of helping you implement data-driven change.