Sync or Swim: How to Streamline Your Data More Efficiently

If you’re an entrepreneur or the owner of a small business, you may come up against this issue a lot. As business people, we tend to overcomplicate things, especially when it comes to the process of the business workflow.

When it comes to business data, there are usually many components that comprise the whole. The more streamlined this data and these processes are, the better your team can do their jobs.

Let’s take a look at how to streamline your data more efficiently. After all, time is money in the real world.

1. Take a Workflow Inventory

This may sound unnatural, but you’d be surprised how many smaller businesses and entrepreneurs just starting out don’t remember to define or carefully document their data processes.

If you fall into this category, this means that you’ve got your work cut out for you. This means keeping a list of all the processes and workflows that you or the business you manage use to implement data.

Remember to keep the list simple – you don’t want to make it too complicated for yourself or your team members. You can do this by listing each process, writing down what you believe the purpose of that process is, and then associating the right people with this particular process.

2. Rank These Processes

The number of processes you work with on a daily basis to maintain a good level of data flow may surprise you.

Now that you’ve got a clearer idea of this, rank each process in order of priority and importance. You may find this more difficult than you think, as you’ll find value in each process.

You’ll even start to realize that you can’t execute one data process without another. However, the better you’ve got your processes in order, the easier you’ll find it to streamline them.

3. Break Down Each Process

Do you really know how each process works when it’s streamlining your data, or is the water still muddy on that one?

The more granular you can break down these steps, the better a picture you’ll get. For some people who work better with visuals, it’s easier to draw each process out on a piece of paper.

Others prefer to line each process up in a Word document or spreadsheet. Remember, it’s important to keep this process simple. Aim for a beginning, a middle, and an end.

4. Ask for Feedback

When it comes to streamlining your data more efficiently, the saying ‘progress, not perfection’ is inherent. This is because you’ll soon find that very few data processes in business are perfect.

What’s more, the business world around us is continually changing. This means that our understanding of our data processes needs to be flexible and willing to take on board more information consistently.

This is a great time to get help from friends, colleagues, employees, and supervisors. Getting feedback on your data processes from anyone who is either directly or indirectly involved with what you do will help you to get a broad picture of what’s working and what isn’t.

5. Automate the Business Workflow

What’s one of the most popular tools that you think is used for streamlining data more efficiently? If you answered spreadsheets, you’d be right. Spreadsheets are used the world over by businesses big and small to help them track all of their data and compile it into a user-friendly format.

We’re almost beyond the help of the spreadsheet, now. With the rapid advancement of automation comes a number of new workflow software solutions that can help with business process management. The majority of them are designed to quickly collect data and organize it in a way that’s beneficial to your business.

6. Always Refine

Remember when we talked about how no business is perfect? This means that once you’ve improved your existing process, you’ll have to continue to revisit it from time to time to refine it once more.

With additions like modern automation, you’ll find the business of streamlining your data a lot easier and more efficient. However, even tools like this need monitoring and updating in order to keep up with your business acumen.

Final Thoughts

The efficiency of an entrepreneurial startup or small business depends, almost entirely, on its ability to streamline its data. If you’re not organized and up to date in this department, you’ll quickly lose your footing. Streamlining your data efficiently can mean the difference between success and disappointment.