The 5 Insights that Expose Your Company’s Biggest Problems

You probably know of analytics tools- software that takes huge amounts of data and outputs reports with trends and insights you couldn’t get any other way.

You may even own analytics tools. But if you don’t use them as a core part of your business, you’re at a disadvantage relative to your competitors.

From our experience helping thousands of clients improve their businesses with the Analytics Engine in our flagship product, SureMDM by 42Gears, we’ve identified five metrics that you should focus on analyzing first.

These five metrics are far from comprehensive, but they will give you a great snapshot of the current state of your device fleet, what problems are lurking in the background, and how to run your devices (and company) more efficiently and effectively.

Let’s look at each in sequence and see what it can do for you.

1. Per-Device Data Consumption

The up-front cost when you buy devices for employees is only part of the full cost; data consumption costs eclipse up-front costs surprisingly fast. You need to keep an eye on data consumption to keep these costs in check.

What Will This Reveal?

Data consumption reflects differences in how employees work, and how effective they are. Abnormally low values might mean employees aren’t doing much work; abnormally high values suggests employees are either inefficient or distracted with data-hungry non-work applications.

In either case, this will let you make sure employees are doing their jobs. You don’t have to confront anyone you suspect of slacking off- the analytics will do the talking for you.

2. Device Battery Levels

If data consumption measures how employees are doing, battery levels tell you how devices are doing. Our clients generate battery level analytics reports every day with SureMDM Analytics Engine, and rely on these reports to get the most out of their devices.

What Will This Reveal?

No one likes devices dying on the job. But if they can’t hold a charge, or don’t charge fully overnight, this will happen more often than you’d like- which is never!

3. Device Location

Nothing is worse than when someone loses a device you give them- or worse, it gets stolen. All the time and effort you put into choosing great devices only makes them more attractive to would-be thieves- but you can keep things under control with SureMDM, which can show you location-tracking data for company-owned devices.

What Will This Reveal?

If companies own devices, they need to know where the devices are. It’s that simple.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. Recent location data is great for finding lost devices, but analyzing long-term device movement is important, too.

If devices (and the employees using them) spend too much or too little time in a given space, this will give you a hint as to what your employees want from your office spaces.

4. Browser Use and Keyword Filtering

Many companies restrict what their employees can access on browsers at work- but far fewer have any idea whether these restrictions actually work.

What Will This Reveal?

Employee productivity is inversely proportional to the number of distractions available- which is to say that distracting websites result in unproductive employees. If your strategy for restricting content doesn’t work, you will needlessly antagonize employees without seeing a benefit.

By seeing how employees browse on work devices, you can also learn what questions they have relating to work, and provide them with the answers they need.

5. Device Updates and Software Updates

For companies to claim that they are dedicated to security, they need to ensure that every device is in line with the company’s security policies. If even one device has an outdated OS or app, the many threat defenses you put in place could be breached.

What Will This Reveal?

Knowing that devices are out-of-date puts you one step closer to rectifying the issue. With the SureMDM console, you can push all needed OS, app, and firmware updates to each device as soon as you find out there is an issue.

Conclusion

Analytics data does not automatically fix issues- but you will know what the issues are, and have a strong sense of what needs to be fixed. No matter how mature your company might be, or how well your company is doing, analytics is essential because it can show you insights you would never see any other way.

If you would like to give analytics a try, but you don’t want to commit to a long-term solution yet, you can try the SureMDM Analytics Engine risk-free for 30 days. Sign-up is easy (no credit card required), and you will also get access to a range of other useful SureMDM features