It's all about Efficiency Gain

Why automate data?  There are at least 6 good reasons to automate data from your data capture applications into your business management and improvement information system.  Some of these reasons are provided below:

To Save Money

It costs less in cash to set-up an automated data integration process than would cost in staff salaries to manually transfer the data.

Utilise Human Resources

As headcount is cut, the staff hours available to carry out the process of getting data into the reporting systems evaporates.

Manage Diminishing Resources

Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation requires better decision-making. Information is the life-blood of management decision making.  Reduce the risks that information will not be available by automating the process.

Reduce Elapsed Time to Reporting

An automated feed can pass the data from the source system to PerformancePlus as soon as it is available. Typically data load processes are run at the end of each day, ensuring that managers have the latest information the very next day.  This can reduce period reporting lags from as much as 6 weeks to 2-3 days!

Improve Data Availability

Automated processes don’t take 20-30 days leave each year, or go off sick, or forget.  If the system fails to do as planned at any time, automated emails can alert a human operator immediately, even before the management user spots that their data hasn’t arrived on schedule!

Improve Data Quality

Re-keying data is historically fraught with dangers regarding data quality.  Automating the data removes the step completely, ensuring that one more risk factor in your data quality assurance is removed, your quality checking workload is reduced, and your managers' confidence in the data is improved.

Increase Amount of Data that can be used in Decision Making

Managers would often like to have more information available to make a particular decision.  Sometimes that data is only going to be used once a month, or once a year. The cost benefit of manually collecting an extra few hundred data values can be substantial, the incremental cost of transferring a few hundred extra data values through an automated process is trivial.