As Wedgewood grew, how and when its people could access data increasingly became a challenge. Wedgewood’s data was siloed in a variety of operational systems – financial, CRM, and HR systems, among others. When business users needed data, they often had to manually extract it from various business applications, load it into Excel, and format it into reports – a painstaking and error-prone process. This regrettably led to some embarrassing moments in meetings when people presented contradictory data on the same sales trends. While data was abundant within Wedgewood, little of it could be trusted implicitly.