From Siloed to Strategic: Bridging the Visibility Gap

From financial insights to customer information, today’s businesses collect more data than ever — yet more than half of business leaders say access to accurate, timely, and trusted data is their biggest challenge.

When data is siloed, outdated, or unreliable, it doesn't just slow down reporting — it slows down growth.

Here's how operations, finance, and technology leaders can unlock true data visibility and use it to drive performance.

Operations: Create a Data-Driven Culture That Drives Performance

Creating a data-driven culture is essential for enabling faster, more informed decision-making.

However, creating a truly data-driven culture is challenging when the data you’re working with is unreliable or inaccessible. Without the right data, organizations risk making uninformed decisions — which could cost as much as $250 million annually.

By empowering employees to understand and utilize data effectively, leaders foster a culture where insights drive action — not assumptions.

When data is centralized and accessible in real time, it transforms how work gets done. In our experience, organizations that focus on accessible, real-time data see measurable improvements, including:

• Capacity planning shifts from reactive to proactive.
• Bottlenecks are identified and resolved faster.
• Resources are aligned more efficiently with demand.
• Audits and compliance checks are streamlined and easier to manage.
• Cross-functional collaboration improves.

A healthcare organization we worked with faced significant operational inefficiencies due to siloed systems and manual reporting. Staff spent hours each week updating spreadsheets to track metrics like patient visits, census trends, and staff activity — a time-consuming and error-prone process. Each report refresh could take two to three hours, and team members spent time each day entering visit data manually.

We replaced their spreadsheets with streamlined data entry workflows and consolidated clinical, operational, and financial data into a central warehouse. Automated dashboards now provide real-time insights into patient admissions, census changes, staffing, and referral trends. As a result, reporting time has dropped significantly and data accuracy has improved. Leaders coach staff more effectively, adjust staffing models, reduce missed referrals, and make faster, more strategic decisions.

Finance: Integrate Data to Drive Impactful Outcomes

Financial leaders often face fragmented systems, inconsistent metric definitions, and reporting delays — all of which obscure the full picture. The result? Financial plans become purely theoretical.

Real insight comes from seeing how dollars flow through the entire operation — not just how they appear on a spreadsheet.

When finance teams integrate operational metrics with financial data, they move from reactive reporting to proactive performance management. Benefits include:

• Service line profitability becomes clearer.
• Forecasts adjust dynamically to demand and marketplace shifts.
• Resource allocation aligns with strategic objectives.

One of our manufacturing clients had all the right systems in place — a cloud ERP, some in-house BI capability, and a reliance on spreadsheets for reporting — but still struggled to generate clear insights. Despite having a dedicated team member focused on analytics, their reporting processes were time-consuming and difficult to scale.

We helped them implement a streamlined analytics solution that pulled financial data directly from their ERP into simplified, impactful dashboards. By narrowing the scope to just the most relevant data and building out tailored visualizations, they moved from cluttered spreadsheets to consistent automated reporting.

This kind of foundation allows finance professionals to shift their focus from producing reports to driving performance. Whether it’s identifying margin drag, optimizing spend, or forecasting with confidence, centralized and automated reporting helps turn finance into a strategic engine — not just a record-keeping function.

Technology: Build a Scalable, Secure Foundation

Technology leaders aren’t system stewards — you’re enablers of enterprise-wide data strategy. But as data volumes grow and systems multiply, organizations face greater complexity, slower reporting, and increased security risk.

Without a strong data foundation, visibility becomes fragmented, reporting slows down, and security vulnerabilities multiply.

To support faster, smarter decisions, your data infrastructure must be secure, scalable, and unified. Start with strong governance:

• Standardize company-wide data definitions to ensure consistency and reduce reconciliation efforts.
• Document metric logic so finance and operations aren’t working from conflicting numbers.
• Establish clear data ownership and access controls to protect sensitive data and enable accountability.

A modern integration layer can unify disparate systems without adding technical debt. And by automating tasks like data validation, report generation, and anomaly detection, IT teams can reduce errors and accelerate access to insights. An integrated data environment also supports automated risk detection and triage to better support rapid response, relieving over-burned security teams.

Finally, expand capacity by empowering “power users” — business users with technical acumen — to provide much-needed backup skills and capacity outside of the IT team. Trained users acting in a self-service capacity can produce high-value reports and insights as well as free up technical professionals for more valuable work.

We’ve seen organizations multiply the impact of IT investments by enabling business users to take on more ownership of data discovery and reporting — especially in departments like finance, HR, and supply chain.

Start Turning Data into Action

Achieving data visibility is no longer a competitive advantage — it's a necessity. By fostering a data-driven culture, integrating financial and operational insights, and centralizing data on a secure, scalable foundation, you empower smarter, faster decision-making at every level.

At Eide Bailly, we help businesses turn data into performance. Want to explore how to connect your systems, unify your reporting, and drive growth? Let’s talk.