When work was mostly in-person, real human cues facilitated collaboration. However, since the digital revolution, we've struggled to find the right tools and tactics to promote effective collaboration. While technological advancements—from email to chat to shared drives—have made significant strides, there's still a lot of room for improvement.
In this blog, we delve into how Zoho Tables, a modern collaborative work management tool, gives collaboration a new dimension, with data management capabilities at its core.
Challenges in traditional collaboration practices
Traditional collaboration practices, like face-to-face meetings, emails, and chats, have inherent challenges. These conventional channels often lead to isolated workflows, inefficiencies, data errors, and limited accessibility. As organizations grow, information overload and inefficient communication become critical issues that slow down operations and impact your bottom line.
How does Zoho Tables enable collaborative work management?
Collaborative Work Management (CWM) is a methodology that organizations use to plan, coordinate, execute, and monitor work effectively across teams and departments.
Zoho Tables, with data management at its core, eliminates silos through its ability to centralize and organize work data, establish smart relationships with tables, and automate mundane tasks based on simple trigger and action logic.
Below are some examples showcasing how our work management software enables seamless collaboration while allowing you to streamline and automate processes and structure your work data:
Launch campaign management
- In work management, the first step is to list your work items, store all relevant details, such as ETA and priority, and assign them to DRIs. For launch campaign management, the content cycle, design cycle, digital marketing cycle, and results/metrics of each campaign can all be tracked under individual tables in Zoho Tables.
- Linking relevant tables ensures information is promptly available without multiple entries or follow-ups via chat or email. For example, connecting a Creative table with a Content table enables both teams to see who the content writer for a particular design project is, for example. Similarly, a digital marketer can link each campaign with the metrics they track, keeping teams updated without drafting emails for each campaign. Centralizing data also eliminates most manual follow-ups.
- Kanban View allows managers to track the progress of each work item across different stages. With automation capabilities, you can automate emails for changes in the status of a work item, ensuring all stakeholders are aware of critical updates and reviews.
- Gallery View allows social media managers to view all items in a creative table, by putting a spotlight on the creatives. They can also view posts in Calendar View, based on their scheduled dates.
- Marketing managers can control access for specific users in a table by creating a view with filtered data and providing the necessary permissions.
Ecommerce order management
It can be overwhelming to manage the many things that keep your online store running. From inventory management to customer orders and shipping, there's a lot to juggle.
- Capture and store your order data from your ecommerce website in an Orders table and maintain an inventory list in an Inventory table. Then store all your vendors and customers in their respective tables, along with all the relevant details.
- Link relevant tables together; for example, link the Order and Inventory tables to ensure the stock in the Inventory table is updated based on each order.
- Add views based on your ecommerce business requirements, including viewing the product catalogue in Gallery View, collecting purchase orders in Form View, and tracking shipping status via Kanban View.
- Automate your stock reorder process when stock reaches a minimum threshold by linking the Vendor table with the Inventory table and automating an email whenever the stock count falls below the threshold.
Collaboration through data management & automation
While Tables includes collaboration features like record-level comments, its primary collaboration strengths lie in:
Centralizing data while providing controlled access
Creating meaningful relationships between tables
Automating emails and follow-ups
Enabling effortless data collection through forms
These features improve data accessibility, foster meaningful relationships between data sets, and eliminate the need for manual follow-ups and emails. Automation also reduces the need for minor updates between coworkers and stakeholders.
Zoho Tables provides an all-in-one collaborative work management solution, helping organizations break silos and work as a unified system.
So what are you waiting for? Try Zoho Tables today!
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