When spreadsheets are running your plant
Every plant has them. Some are fine. A few are one resignation away from being a serious problem.
The ones that are fine
A spreadsheet used by one person for their own analysis is not a problem. Neither is a one-off calculation, or a list that would take five minutes to rebuild.
Replacing these is a solution looking for a problem, and we will tell you so.
The ones that are a problem
Multiple people editing the same file. A filename ending in v3_FINAL_USE_THIS. Logic complex enough that only one person understands it. Data re-keyed from it into another system. A process that stops entirely when a particular person is on holiday.
Each of those is a specific failure waiting for a specific bad day.
What it is actually costing
Usually three things: the hours spent maintaining and reconciling it, the errors nobody catches because a spreadsheet cannot enforce a rule, and the decisions made on numbers that were wrong.
The third is the expensive one and the hardest to see. A scheduling spreadsheet that is quietly optimistic about changeover time costs more in missed dates than in labour.
Why now and not five years ago
The reason these never got replaced is that a developer for three months could not be justified for a process wasting six hours a week. The arithmetic has genuinely changed — work that was too small to bother with is now routinely worth doing, and often in weeks rather than months.
How to pick the first one
Not the biggest. The one where the pain is clearest and the scope is smallest, so it proves the approach quickly and the next conversation is easier.
If you are not sure which that is, describing two or three of them is usually enough for us to point at one.
Recognise any of this?
Describe it in a few sentences and we will tell you what it would take — or that it is not worth doing, which happens more often than you would expect.
Start a conversation- Why ERP and system replacements fail in manufacturingSix-figure implementations that stall are common enough in this region to be unremarkable. The failure pattern is consistent, and it is not really about software.
- What a manufacturer's website actually needsYour website's job is not to impress. It is to let a buyer confirm you can make the thing, and then contact you without friction.