This paper is based on European Manufacturing Survey collected in 2019 for five countries -Sweden, Spain, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia. The study reveals that majority of companieshave technologies that allow them automatically to collect data. Companies are also using thedata for different purposes, and often more than one purposes. We also found that many ofcommonly used digital technologies are also associated with automatically collected data.Although the literature suggests that ignorance of data collection may lead to defects, we findno connection to actual waste in this study.