The data you already have in your company and aren't using

The most valuable data is the data that already exists

When we work with an SME for the first time, one of the first things we do is an inventory of the data already available. The results are almost always surprising: most companies already have everything they need to answer the most critical questions about their business.

Some questions SMEs could answer right away, if the data were organised correctly:

• Which customers generate 80% of revenue? And how much does it cost to serve them?
• Which product or service lines have the best margins?
• Where do delivery delays concentrate?
• What's the average customer response time, and how has it changed over the last 12 months?

These answers already exist. They're buried in Excel files, in ERP reports no one reads, in monthly exports forgotten in a shared folder. The problem isn't collecting them: it's making them accessible at the moment they're needed.

Why existing data goes unused

In almost all the SMEs we've analysed, data goes unused not because it's missing, but for three structural reasons.

• The data is fragmented across different systems that don't talk to each other. The ERP has sales, the CRM has contacts, Excel has hours worked, the PM tool has project status. Every analysis requires a manual export from each one.
• There's no one responsible for turning data into useful information. Analyses arrive late or don't arrive because they're only extracted on request, in an unsystematic way.
• Existing reports are static. A PDF with last quarter's data doesn't help you decide today. Questions change; a fixed report doesn't let you explore them.

Where to start: the data closest to a decision

We don't start from the technical architecture. We start from a simple question: what's the decision you make most often without enough information?

If the answer is "I don't know which customers are worth following more closely", we work on revenue and purchase-frequency data. If it's "I don't know how much time we're spending on each job", we work on the PM tool's logs. If it's "I don't know why we're losing customers", we work on the CRM data.

In all these cases the data already exists. The work to do is connecting the sources, normalising the format, and building a view that lets you answer the question without a manual export every time.

A concrete example: from three Excel files to an operational dashboard

A professional-services company we work with had three separate Excel files: hours worked per client, quotes issued, invoices issued. None of the three was connected to the others. The owner couldn't tell, without an hour of manual analysis, which clients were losing money against the quote.

We connected the three files into a single data model and built a dashboard that automatically updates margin per client every week. Zero new data collected: just the three existing Excel files, connected the right way. "In two weeks I discovered that three of my biggest clients were systematically losing money. I'd had this data for years," the owner told us.