Turn data into actionable insights using Acorel’s Monitoring Tool

When an organization grows, changes take place at a rapid pace. These changes also include process changes. To keep up with these changes, it is important that organizations continuously monitor the quality of their data. The misleading results of poor quality data can negatively impact your business. Think of consequences such as reputational damage due to incorrect e-mails or late payment of invoices.

Importance of data monitoring

Data monitoring is important because it promotes business agility. Of course, a solid preparation phase can ensure that the quality of your data is observed, but data monitoring is more flexible due to the point in the process when the quality checks are performed. If the process somehow changes, a new time-consuming preparation phase needs to be initiated. While data monitoring saves the organization time and money because the check will always be done at the end of the process. If changes made in the process cause the quality of your data to be lowered, you will notice because it is being monitored. This way organizations can keep track of their process data and optimize their processes accordingly.

Fitting your customized needs

As any IT specialist will agree, solving a particular problem often creates a new problem that only becomes apparent after the old problem has been solved. To avoid this, Acorel likes to think ahead and create solutions where modularity and scalability – whilst keeping a keen eye on relevance – are strongly considered. Although in most cases the use case is simple and you want to gain insights quickly, there are scenarios where you need a more in-depth view of your operations and there is need for more complex queries. We created a tool for just that. By scoping the components you want to use, based on the data you want to analyse, the tool will guide you to create advanced analytics quickly. Therefore, Acorel’s Monitoring Tool will make the journey to optimize your operational flows a whole lot easier.

When developing an Operational Analytics tool, it is important to identify the problems the user will face when they want to optimize their operational flows. Multiple solutions should be provided for different scenarios, without overcomplicating things by adding too much functionality.. Whether it is for getting a better insight into the work floor processing speed or identifying bottlenecks in the software systems, the general approach stays the same. The only difference is the angle from which the data is viewed. Acorel’s Monitoring Tool is created to push the user in the direction they want to go by showing functionality appropriate to their use case.

Used technologies

At Acorel we like to challenge ourselves and keep up to date with the latest technologies. Taking on new challenges outside of the SAP environment is one of them. This tool is being developed using .NET 7 with Blazor WebAssembly and consisting of a .NET 7 Web API (back-end) which fetches the data from the provided source safely using your Identity provider. Together with a .NET 7 Blazor WebAssembly client (front-end) which is able to showcase any operational data in the way you want, the client WebApp is Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compiled for optimized user experience.

Sharing this knowledge among other colleagues during our knowledge sessions is very important to us. We help each other grow into our interests, whilst learning at the same time. This way, the products we make are always a team effort.

How does it work?

In the tool you can create a dashboard. In this dashboard you can connect a data source to it. From here you can select a table and uncheck redundant columns that you don’t need to review, so you only get insights on the information that is relevant to you.

You can now choose from a menu of different components you want to use, depending on your use case. Some options include:

• Table
• Pie Chart
• Line Chart
• Bar Chart

In these components, you can query a value you want to compare or analyse. Some options include:

• Combined values
• Calculated values
• Aggregated values

Some examples:

• A pie chart which showcases the number of errors not being handled within a week in comparison to the errors handled within a week.
• A graph of processing times from orders throughout the day.
• A pie chart of orders grouped by an aggregated value.

In-app documentation

Within Acorel we try to avoid forwarding questions as much as we can. We like to take ownership of potential problems and tackle them ourselves. In order to make this mindset not counterproductive, we need to make sure the user can find the right information in easy and quick fashion. We build our solutions accordingly by adding easy-to-use and in-app documentation such as guides and user manuals. This way we not only make sure our product is easy to use, but we also put emphasis on showing how easy it can be to discover things yourself.

Release and further plans

As of now, we are happy to announce that the first version of the tool will be released at the end of this year. Hopefully, we will be able to showcase some beta features like predictive analytics and suggestive queries using Machine Learning. Further development will be based on optimizing the query experience by adding client-side caching and real-time change streaming using WebSockets. At the end of December there will be a more sophisticated article about the tool showing in-depth guides on how to use the tool in a way that it can add value to your business.

Stay tuned!