The Data You Already Have in Your Company and Are Not Using
- Roberto Benanti
- May 11
- 3 min read
Every company produces data. Orders, invoices, hours worked, delivery times, open tickets, campaigns sent. Most of this data has existed for years, distributed across ERP systems, Excel spreadsheets, CRMs and internal communication tools.
The problem is not a lack of data. It's that in Italian SMEs this data is rarely used to make decisions. It gets extracted on request, aggregated manually, and presented in static reports nobody updates. This article is about changing that dynamic, starting from what you already have.
The most valuable data is the data you already have
When we work with an SME for the first time, one of the first things we do is an inventory of existing data. The results are almost always surprising: most companies already have everything they need to answer their most critical business questions.
Questions SMEs could answer immediately if their data were properly organised:
• Which clients generate 80% of revenue? And how much does it cost to serve them?
• Which product or service lines have better margins?
• Where do delivery delays concentrate?
• What is the average client response time, and how has it changed over the last 12 months?
These answers already exist. They are buried in Excel files, in ERP reports nobody reads, in monthly exports forgotten in a shared folder. The challenge isn't collecting them: it's making them accessible when needed.
Why existing data goes unused
In almost every SME we have analysed, data goes unused not because it is missing, but for three structural reasons.
1. Data is fragmented across systems that don't communicate. 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.
2. Nobody is responsible for turning data into useful information. Analyses arrive late or not at all because they are extracted only on demand, by whoever knows how, non-systematically.
3. Existing reports are static. A PDF with last quarter's data doesn't help make decisions today. Questions change, and a fixed report doesn't allow you to explore them.
Where to start: the data closest to a decision
We don't start from the technical architecture. We start with a simple question: what is the decision you make most often without enough information?
If the answer is "I don't know which clients are worth following more closely", we work on revenue and purchase frequency data. If it's "I don't know how long we're spending on each project", we work on PM tool logs. If it's "I don't know why we're losing clients", we work on CRM data.
In all these cases the data already exists. The work 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 spreadsheets to an operational dashboard
A professional services firm we work with had three separate Excel files: hours worked per client, quotes issued, invoices issued. None of the three were connected. The principal couldn't know, without an hour of manual analysis, which clients were running at a loss against the quoted amount.
We connected the three files into a single data model and built a dashboard that automatically updates profitability per client every week. No new data to collect: just the three existing spreadsheets, connected the right way.
"In two weeks I discovered that three of my largest clients were systematically running at a loss. I had all the data for years. I had just never put it together." Principal, consulting firm.
What data do you already have in your company that you're not using?
At SBK Solutions we support SMEs in analysing existing data and building operational dashboards. The starting point is always a concrete business question, not a data transformation project.
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