Automate Incident Reporting in 5 Days
Thomas Edison once said: “There’s a better way of doing things – find it”. Loss Prevention and Safety departments worldwide rely heavily on Microsoft Excel and e-Mail to capture and communicate their incident reports within their organizations. Approximately 2/3rds of all ThinkLP incident automation implementations are with organizations who are automating manual Excel-based incident processes, with the remaining 1/3rd of companies switching from existing case management solutions.
A common theme we hear from our customers is that if they knew how easy it was to automate it, they would have done it a long time ago.
The aim of this post is to simply lay out the 5 steps, which have and can be accomplished in less than a week, so that you may start realizing the benefits of having a next-generation Loss Prevention & Safety cloud in your organization.
STEP 1 – ORGANIZE YOUR INCIDENT REPORTS
Companies have all sorts of incidents that are tracked today. The most common incidents we see include internal and external theft, employee and customer injuries, harassment and discrimination reports, and other general types of incidents. Some reports are as simple as a few questions and others are multiple pages in length.
Regardless of your existing incident reporting processes, pull together the types of forms you’d like to automate and keep them handy for when you talk with your Incident Management solution provider. If you don’t have existing forms we can get you started by using libraries of existing templates which you can then customize as you see fit.
STEP 2 – IDENTIFY YOUR SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Incidents occur throughout your organization. If you’re a retailer, you’ll have stores and distribution centers. If you’re a government agency or municipality, you have field offices and mobile work sites. If you’re a financial services organization, you have offices and branches. If you’re a global company, you have multiple countries and languages to manage. Some organizations require front-line staff to fill out and submit these reports, while others have management support such as regional and district loss prevention managers. Make note of the various sources of incidents and who would be the best people to submit the information. Then document who manages and consumes the information including what is most valuable to them as it will be used in the configuration process.
STEP 3 – SELECT AN INCIDENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
This is a critical step, and we certainly hope you choose ThinkLP, but as good corporate citizens we recommend checking out all your options before selecting the best for you. There are a handful of companies in the market that provide LP incident reporting solutions and each have their own technology platform.
ThinkLP excels in providing a comprehensive cloud-based, mobile-enabled, socially-aware, and globally-secure platform that is incredibly configurable with beautiful dashboard & reporting capabilities. We’re the next-generation of LP & Safety management platforms – and we’d love to talk with you about our vision for the industry and how we may be able to help you automate your departmental processes.
We’re also infinitely scalable with affordable solutions whether you’re a single person department or a global organization.
If you haven’t already done so, make sure to read our whitepaper “Questions to Ask during an LP Automation Demo” for some good requirements to ensure are met when selecting an LP management platform.
STEP 4 – CONFIGURE YOUR SOLUTION
With the right LP management platform in place, the configuration can be straight forward. There are three major phases of incident & metric management workflow: intake, management, and reporting. Work closely with your vendor-partner to load all the base set of data required to set up your system such as your locations, incident forms, security groups & rules, and more. Then concentrate on the workflow of your incidents and metrics: define as clearly as you can the path that work follows within your organization and configure the workflow and automated e-mail notifications to save time and effort. Then you can concentrate on creating the right set of reports and dashboards that will make you and your team immediately productive. ThinkLP has countless reports pre-configured and are concentrated in two areas: action-oriented and analysis-oriented. Action-oriented reports guide decisions on a day-to-day basis. The analysis-oriented reports and dashboards are usually meant more for trend reporting and longer-term insight into the operations of your business. The beautiful part about configuring solutions like the ThinkLP cloud is that with the extremely configurable settings you can choose to modify your platform on the fly and always act in accordance with the business need of the day.
STEP 5 – LAUNCH
Gaining buy-in from teams prior to launch is imperative: conduct conference calls; have webinars or in-person training sessions; demonstrate the capabilities and get people excited about the platform they can use to help them manage their world more effectively. Launching a new LP cloud solution includes both the migration of data from historical systems into the new ThinkLP cloud, and training of users in a training format that meets the needs of your team. Organizations of different sizes have different launch requirements and complexities and we’re familiar with all sizes of organizations and the unique challenges and opportunities they face.
This 5-step process is a trimmed-down version of our typical roll-outs, and it has been done in less than 5 days before. ThinkLP is an extraordinary LP & Safety management system that you’ll have to see to believe. Contact us today to schedule a demo and consider adopting a revolutionary approach to managing your data and processes in the cloud.
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