Company data
Company data is all internal and external data occurring in a company .
General
All economic subjects (companies, private households , government and foreign countries ) have data. These data arrive either by chance in the course of economic activity or through research on economic subjects. The term data is to be interpreted very broadly and includes all information , numbers , values or formulated findings that have been obtained through measurement or observation . What these data have in common is that they can be documented and archived on data carriers ( written and print media , image or sound carriers ) . The economic agents collect this data and process it in order to be able to make decisions based on it. Company data therefore form an important basis for decision-making and are also used for external presentation in the context of company comparisons or public relations . When creditworthiness checks are carried out by credit institutions, they are legally obliged to request certain company data from borrowers .
species
In general, company data can be divided into internal and external company data with regard to its origin . While internal company data is created or obtained in the company itself, external company data comes from the environmental status of a company ( market data , customer data , consumer behavior , business connections , laws , but also the weather ).
According to the operational function , the company data comes from the following areas:
- In procurement , data is generated from the purchase of raw materials , consumables and supplies (for production companies ) and finished products (in retail ).
- Production data arise from the manufacture of tangible and intangible goods and / or services .
- Sales or sales data arise from the sale of the goods and / or services produced on the market .
- The financing results in financial data through the monetary supply and control between capital procurement ( internal and external financing ) and use of capital ( investment ).
The cross-sectional or service functions are directly related to the basic operational functions:
- The company management is entrusted with the management of the company. The data resulting from this and from the tasks of organization and planning are the most important of a company.
- The Human Resources collects personal data from the procurement, supervision and management of staff .
- The administration collects data from its administrative activities (such as business trips ).
- The information deals with the acquisition and processing of information and, in its functional form, forms the central data management of a company.
- The Research and Development collects data about new products / services and the development of existing.
- Logistics data prove the optimal confluence of material, value and information flows.
The electronically processed company data can be divided into
- Structured data, e.g. B. ERP data which arise in the course of operations and are further divided into master data and transaction data .
- Unstructured data such as texts , concepts or email traffic .
According to the importance for the company, there is data with high internal availability, for example in the area of data backup or server operation . They also often require strong internal and external secrecy ( access rights , especially for customer, personnel or calculation data, but also for financial data). Other company data are only of short-term or no importance for the company's success ( e.g. mail spam ) and should be deleted as quickly as possible in order to avoid unnecessary hard drive costs.
Data management
A data management in companies must ensure that the data is brought into the business processes with its maximum usage potential and that it is optimally used during operation . The task of data management is, among other things, the provision of databases, the maintenance of information quality and the guarantee of data security. The data management contributes to a needs-based data storage and archiving. If you want to use the structured data analytically ( creditworthiness of customers, market segmentation , market analysis , advertising campaigns ), they are usually processed for specific purposes with business intelligence methods and z. B. held in a data warehouse . Unstructured data can be accessed using an indexed full-text search .
Databases
Today company data is stored in databases and made available to users and application programs . The data can be summarized into business or technical key figures and provide the company management with an important basis for decision-making. Another purpose is to produce statistics for various purposes. Large companies control and document all the data required in the company, their meaning, their interrelationships and the aspects required for their management (such as data responsibility, data security, historization, etc.) within the framework of the data architecture that is part of the IT architecture .
Data security
The data security is to ensure that corporate data in compliance with the protection targets confidentiality , availability , authenticity and integrity of the access remain deprived of unauthorized persons. A data protection officer monitors data protection , with the focus on particularly sensitive data from corporate strategy , research and development , customer data or personal data. Data security is primarily intended to prevent a perpetrator from being able to commit data theft by spying on data .
publicity
The publication of company data serves to present the company to the interested public ( customers , competitors , credit institutions , rating agencies , creditors or tax authorities ). As part of the disclosure requirement, accounting law requires the publication of a small part of the company data from accounting . The narrowing down to certain data from accounting shows that only a very small part of all existing company data reaches the interested public in accounting and in the annual financial statements ( annual report ).
Company databases
External data is collected by a number of private and public institutions, e.g. B. from Creditreform or BaFin .