Business owners can take charge by holding quarterly reviews. The Quarterly Business Review (QBR) requires an assessment of performance and achievements over the previous three months. Regular assessments like QBR can help companies stay aligned with their goals and meet deadlines. Reviews help businesses gain insight and set goals based on existing budgets and priorities. By tracking your achievements, you can add value to your business.
If you notice a decline in performance, you can immediately re-evaluate your current strategy to prevent a disruption in next quarter’s growth. Helping everyone in the organization stay informed about overall business performance can also encourage employees to set goals to help achieve annual goals and key results (OKRs).
When planning a review, it’s important to gather the right information—information that can help you uncover actionable insights. Let’s take a look at the steps to help you conduct a quarterly review effectively:
Organize company-wide audits
One of the greatest benefits of internal auditing is the consolidation of information about your capital use and expenditure. For companies managing hundreds of assets, maintain usage trails for each asset throughout the year. When the number of assets runs into the thousands, it becomes nearly impossible to do it manually. Asset tracking solutions record how much of an asset is being used and by whom. These details help verify ownership and maintain transparency of all business operations.
For quarterly business reviews, you can also track all capital expenditures that occurred over the past three months. Many of these expenses can be IT hardware; companies can use tracking systems to schedule and track maintenance and purchases of all assets. This means repair costs can be recorded in one place and easily accessed during business reviews. In addition to this, you can also keep an eye on the money spent on new assets and inventory.This type of information is critical when preparing quarterly financial expense statements, ensuring that the information comes from a single source of truth
Run an Asset Utilization Report
Reporting is a key tool for demonstrating business OKRs in quarterly business reviews. Visualizing all the data helps employees understand how the business has progressed and grown over time, and helps each employee learn more about the workflows that define their business and enable it to succeed. For example, a medical center’s quarterly reviews are likely to include medical equipment usage reports. Such reports are an effective way to control costs, as advanced or specialized equipment is often expensive and should be managed carefully.
Businesses gain access to in-depth analytics that allow them to develop informed strategies for the coming year. If you find that asset-related expenses are straining your budget, consider it a sign to dispose of obsolete and aging equipment. In addition to its use in planning, the same report can be provided to all stakeholders to provide an overview of the capital investment of the business.
You can also include KPI reports in your quarterly review. Suppose you want to compare how maintenance KPIs for IT equipment have changed over the past two quarters. You can compile data to determine the number of work orders executed for all laptops in your organization, so you can identify progress or problem spots. Access to this data can help you investigate the cause of downtime and plan preventative maintenance to prevent lost productivity.
Read more: 5 Important Consumables Inventory Reports You Should Run for Your Business
Assess employee productivity
Employee productivity is a core factor in measuring business performance and is the key performance indicator for quarterly reviews. Your company can only achieve new goals if employees meet deadlines and within budget, and only if those goals are defined. The key is to have the right mechanisms in place to measure productivity. Start by setting baselines for each quarter and be ready to adjust them to fit your business environment.
The best way to measure productivity is to track the number of tasks completed. For example, you might want to check how many work orders were executed by a particular employee during a quarter, and how many work orders were executed by employees across departments on average. You can do this simply by using management software that enables you to assign users jobs and monitor their status at any time.
If you notice a drop in the number of tasks your employees are completing, you can flag that drop for investigation so you can see what is at play. Doing so eliminates the possibility of long-term productivity losses eroding profits and helps you understand the issues your employees are facing.
Assess achievement of goals
Conducting quarterly reviews is a great way to see how well your business goals are being met. This brings employees together to identify and overcome business obstacles in time for the end-of-year review. Beyond that, quarterly reviews give departments the opportunity to align each other’s goals in order to achieve organizational goals and ultimately improve the bottom line.
When measuring achievement, evaluate it against key KPIs. For example, if your goal is to control expenses, then you should track asset purchases, downtime costs, and lost items. By using asset tracking software, you can easily reduce costs by eliminating identical purchases and controlling ownership of items.
After each quarter, sit down with your team to review and assess goals and progress. Regular check-ins help users voice their concerns and reassess their defined goals and timelines.
Read more: 5 Key Benefits of Fixed Asset Audits and How Asset Tracking Software Can Help
Get the Most Out of Quarterly Business Reviews
Business reviews are extremely important in achieving company OKRs. They help organizations gain insight into how well they accomplished their goals for the previous quarter, and set and adjust goals for the next quarter. You can also perform audits to verify asset spend and utilization, and run reports to assess equipment life and usefulness.
While reviews are mostly about tracking metrics, don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate achievements. Doing so helps increase employee motivation and encourages them to achieve bigger milestones.
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