Data has been referred to by some as the oil of the digital era. When you consider how an ever-growing set of digital tools enables us to sort through mountains of data to make more efficient and informed decisions, the reference certainly fits.
At MB&A, we understand the value in being able to make sense of the massive amounts of data running through the pipes of the internet and your organization. We are just trying to solve a different problem. ExAM (or the Extensible Assessment Manager) enables organizations to focus on specific problem sets or decisions. Essentially, we want our clients to do a really good job of collecting the small slice of information that makes all the difference to them. To be clear, this isn’t a strike against big data its a companion approach that can be highly effective when its applied to targeted problem areas. In fact our approach can make can often be successfully paired with advanced data science techniques to identify issues at scale by filtering out noise in the data.
ExAM targets the development of highly specific data collections and feeds that data into ExAM and Salesforce, so that it can be used to support business process execution, decision making, and analysis. Sifting through this thin slice of data for the insight that makes a difference can help executives connect, correlate data, and inform their business strategies and models. Inspections are a great example of this, where less is often more, and the more targeted and structured the data collection often the easier it is to leverage that data in future business processes and decision making.
Understanding Inspections
By enabling organizations to continually evolve the data they collect (We need a picture of every deficiency) against their inspections we enable a constant focus on the most important data elements and avoid extraneous data collection. By enabling them to direct the inspection on the basis of the characteristics of the thing being inspected (Does the building have a pool?) we reduce wasted effort and meaningless data. By providing the ability to direct inspectors through a decision tree (Is there a hole in the fence –>How big is the hole?–>Less than 1 meter) we can collect accurate structured data which is then more easily used to support decisions and business processes.
Set up the inspection, perform the collection, review the data
To get this critical slice of data, you may need to go directly to your stakeholders or through forms and surveys or into the field with our mobile app. Once there, our ability to help you to ask better questions by offering samples and prompts reduces training burdens. To provide context and collect location information, ExAM automatically gathers measurements and offers photo markup.
Quite simply, we help you to get information out of people’s heads and into your business processes, technology, and decision-making processes.
Whether you’re exploring our ExAM4Enterprise.com products to perform data calls, surveys, or solicit customer feedback, or our ExAM4Inspections.com products to gather information in support of quality assurance, auditing, and compliance use cases, the approach is the same: Gather better data and make the process of gathering better data easier.
ExAM enables you to:
- Gather more accurate information via targeted questions and formats (e.g., Likert scale, video, and photos with markup).
- Gather information that enables you to tailor experiences for your stakeholders’ needs, values, and preferences. Our ExAM4Inspections mobile app is a great example, in that it functions offline and the apps can be adapted to collect data by use case.
- Gather information where your sources hang out. Irrespective of whether your audience uses mobile apps, SMS, websites, or social media, ExAM empowers to get your questions answered within that channel.
Using ExAM, you can streamline data collection by:
- Tapping into Salesforce to ask more relevant questions and gather data from the right leads, contacts, or users.
- Interpreting data against Salesforce records, or mapping it onto those records to drive use cases.
- Seeing data flow into the system, recording completeness, and pacing the volume you acquire.
Since ExAM helps you to gather all of this data in Salesforce, it is immediately available to use in both your standard and custom apps. You can even embed ExAM into Salesforce to harness its data collection capabilities across applications. For this, our Lightning Web Viewer makes it easy to drop the data you collect right into your app. If, instead, you want to collect information based on events in Salesforce, you need only specify the event, create a group of contacts, users, or leads and then automate your data collection based on configurable filtering criteria.
At the end of the day, we pride ourselves on creating applications and tools that enable our customers to leverage critical data in their business and decision-making processes and arming them with the agile solutions that will serve their needs for today and tomorrow.
