Over 80% firms use stale data for decision-making, says study

Even though the world has become increasingly data-driven, a new global study shows that organisations increasingly face problems getting the right data in the right place for making critical business decisions.

The research, conducted by Dimensional Research for data integration specialist Fivetran, finds that 82% of companies are making decisions based on stale information. Inevitably, this is leading to wrong decisions and lost revenue, as echoed by 85% respondents.

Stale data is basically information no longer needed for daily operations, let’s say, your employee handbook that’s a decade old or ten different versions of a sales pitch done by a former employee, and so on. 

The study explained this concept with the help of ERP data. It said that 86% of respondents said that their business needs access to real-time ERP data to make smart business decisions, yet only 23% have systems in place to make that possible. And almost everyone said that they are struggling to gain consistent access to information stored in their ERP systems. 

Poor access to ERP data directly impacts their business with slowed operations, bad decision-making and lost revenue, said the respondents, it showed.

“If companies are going to truly be data-driven, they cannot base decisions on only a fraction of the information or out-of-date business data," said George Fraser, CEO at Fivetran. 

“Success with data requires looking at the freshest, most complete dataset possible. Winning companies are the ones that are nimble enough to access the most current data and immediately put it to work,” he added.

For businesses today, the requirement to successfully put data to work is being able to access all data across cloud and on-premise technology such as ERP systems. Traditional ERP systems house critical operational data such as supply chain and manufacturing information. This information needs to be integrated, for example, with the data housed in marketing and sales systems to give businesses the information they need to be responsive to market trends, the study said.