Location sciences and solutions for modern-day enterprises: Why tracking business activity is crucial to business growth

By Udit Agarwal, Founder and CEO, TrackOlap

Human capital is perhaps the greatest asset of an organization. As shown by a growing amount of research, a company’s success is directly proportional to its workforce efficiency. However, businesses operating in certain sectors such as R&D, sales, marketing, and manpower outsourcing, find it extremely demanding to manage and keep a track the performance of their field employees in real-time.

Such lack of transparency can cause significant losses, especially in today’s fiercely competitive business landscape. Given the criticality of the situation, there is a dire need for a technology-driven solution that automates and streamlines the employee tracking process. This is where location science comes into the picture, addressing the challenges pertaining to areas like employee management, and facility and fleet management.

By leveraging modern technologies such as AI and data analytics, companies are now able to monitor almost 100% of employee activity and communications, the work done, official app usage, client engagement, and location tracking by access badge. The technology helps enterprises walk the tightrope between productive monitoring and surveillance, the former being devoted just to optimize efficiency.

The data gathered through such monitoring activities can be used to improve subsequent functions, critical in the decision-making process at various organizational levels, thereby helping company leaders to solve business problems, optimize operations and uncover new opportunities. Thus, location science is now deemed crucial to the growth of businesses.

Different requirements, different solutions
Entrepreneurs, senior leaders and even executives can reap immense benefit from location sciences based solutions, including reduced operational costs, improved efficiency and ultimately, better business outcomes. For example, employee activities are often not recorded in the official system, resulting in a discrepancy in workforce management. Especially, at a time when it is becoming more and more common for employees working remotely, this can enable companies to harness the full potential of their workforce.

Speaking about employee monitoring, business leaders often fail to identify the importance of keeping an eye on their office staff. As chronicled in recent reports, employees tend to spend at least 20-30% of their work hours in trying to do mundane, unproductive or secondary activities. This takes a lot of time away from performing critical tasks. It is this loss that monitoring services seek to remove. Furthermore, such apps and solutions offer better employee insights, such as which employee is more productive? Which employee is good at time management etc.? It is not just about pointing out the poor performers; these tech-based offerings allow the managers to identify the high-potential employees. Moreover, they can help them compute the working hours of employees who work on an hourly basis.

Likewise, Attendance and Leave Management applications record employees’ punching card timings and leave details. Real-time recording of attendance can be of much use to managers who struggle to keep their team in sync. From keeping a track to addressing all attendance and leave related queries in the shortest time span, the entire workflow becomes smoother.

As a result, the entire team will work in tandem, thereby bringing a higher level of transparency and fostering a culture of trust. In addition to the aforementioned benefits, another major advantage provided by such systems is the integration of role-based interfaces that make it easier for employers to distribute the workload and manage the business activities. When it comes to large-scale projects, this is deemed even more important.

Analytics and IoT-based platforms leverage location sciences to offer solutions for employee efficiency, business automation, facility management, smart transport, and fleet management. Enterprises today have built an entire employee efficiency system comprising facilities such as sales force automation, field force, employee tracking, mobile CRM, attendance, service management, field force management, and basic HRM activities, among others.

On the administrative side, such portals enable employers with real-time data of employee movement and activities, assigning of tasks and real-time updates. Additionally, the platforms also help with forms and leads management, reports generation, and data management.

Apart from employees, such portals can also manage fleets through an advanced and automated vehicle tracking software that uses geo-fencing and can monitor the condition of the vehicle as well as the driver to ensure minimum loss due to accidents or wear and tear, thereby decreasing operating costs, increasing productivity, and controlling unauthorized usage.

As we continue to build more automation tools, the vision should be towards reinventing the IoT domain and making it a cost-effective, cloud-based ecosystem rich applications and intelligent predictions available for all that can be a great helping hand, and all seeing-eye for enterprises.