Where is your data and how are you using it?

Imagine you run a plumbing company. One of your plumbers completes a job and comes back to the office, where somebody in administration picks up the job card and transcribes it into a job management system. This information is then transferred into a billing system which generates a customer invoice. If you use paper forms or input data manually, there is a lot of room for error, misplaced paper and delay.

But if your data and systems are integrated, your plumber doesn't have to record the job information and nobody has to input it when he gets back to the office. The system can measure the distance to a job, how long it took to get there and time spent on site. All this information can be mapped back into your job management system and billing engine. This gives you faster access to more accurate information, and allows you to issue invoices more quickly – and hopefully be paid more quickly! By integrating job information with inventory management systems, you know what parts have been used and can put in an order to restock before they run out.

What is data integration?

Data integration is the practice of combining information from various sources into something useful. It's about managing data efficiently and making it available to everyone who needs it. When you're under constant pressure to make your business run better, data integration is essential to improve business processes and decision-making.

At its simplest level, data integration avoids manual data entry and the inevitable mistakes. It stops things being overlooked, and helps you get billing done faster and more accurately. Taken to the next level, data integration allows you to start realising the potential of the vast amounts of data you collect each day. It increases the worth of the data sets by making sense of the data. You know more about your customers and more about your business performance. When you bring disparate data sets together you reduce data complexity, and improve the accessibility of the data to make collaboration easier. Giving staff flexibility in how they view and use data makes it easier for them to understand it, and the ability to provide and make sense of data in real time allows business to make fast decisions when required.

Data integration in the real world

No matter what industry you're in, you're pretty much guaranteed to be generating a lot of data. But how well are you using it to benefit your business?

A construction company may use one brand of excavator with built-in GPS tracking, another brand of bulldozer with a different tracking system, and supply vehicles with yet another brand of tracking units installed. This spits out a lot of data in a lot of different formats. Integration means you can normalise the data from all three systems, view it together in the same place and push it into the project management systems. You can use that same interface to show fault codes and utilisation rates or even to remotely control machinery.

A freight operator can integrate with transport or freight management systems, to track when goods have been delivered in order to bill customers more quickly, or with enterprise maintenance scheduling tools so nobody needs to go out taking and inputting manual readings.

Across different industries, business owners or managers want solutions that save them time by integrating data from a wide variety of sources to improve business outcomes. Ultimately data integration allows businesses to find all the data, clean it up, monitor changes, then transform it into something useful that delivers a competitive advantage.