Still Planning in Spreadsheets?

Spreadsheets are good! I must have 1000's of Excel, Sheets and Numbers files and I bet you do to. I've used them for extracting, converting, and uploading data. I've used them for collating expenses and creating invoices. I've used them for building to-do lists, doing Pareto analysis, determining historical and forecast volatility, building heat maps, creating forecasts, constructing task matrixes, managing projects, recording configurations, creating tables for presentations, brainstorming, validating calculations and on and on and on it goes.

Having piqued my own interest, I stopped typing and went to count some of them. On the main drive on my old laptop there are 11396 .xls type files. I didn't bother with the other drive, or the other laptop, or the old desktop, or the external drives, cloud drives and a myriad of USB drives or the Google, Dropbox & Microsoft drives and not to forget the various email accounts with their own folders filled with files. Spreadsheets galore! I must have 100000's of Excel files!

Yes, spreadsheets are fabulous productivity tools. So easy to use. But for managing complex & dynamic datasets and collaborative planning they are bad. "No!" I hear you cry. "We run our business on spreadsheets, and we love them!" Well, challenges you are facing that spring to mind are:

Quality

Efficiency

Capability

Performance

Accuracy

Security

It is impossible to be sure that data has not been copied, tampered with, or viewed by unauthorised individuals inside or outside the company. Formulas can be changed, both intentionally and inadvertently. The very construction of a spreadsheet & its data is editable and even deletable.

Links are easily broken, removed, or replaced. Ownership is both specific to the individual who built the solution (are they still there? Is there support?) but also to anyone who has a copy.

Data consistency is always a problem with multiple versions of spreadsheets floating around by email. Version control is a nightmare! Who has the latest copy? Shared drives help with auditing and access rights but just because a folder on a group drive is the source doesn't mean it is the best version or that it hasn't been downloaded and compromised.

If the consolidation of data between users and departments is manual, then it's far too easy to miss a step or paste the wrong data and generate formula errors. Spreadsheets might be flexible and let anyone add rows, columns, tabs, sheets, and fresh data but where’s the master data control?

Then there are the limitations on data size. Comparing past data bloats files and then the performance becomes dire. Let’s not forget the redundancy either. Spreadsheets tend to get used for the task, project or planning cycle and then filed away and are rarely used again resulting in huge wastage of space, energy, and cost.

From annual operating plans to next year's trade promotions and from consensus forecasts to distribution plans, spreadsheets carry these weaknesses with them. They erode confidence, reduce engagement, and lose trust. Spreadsheets are not the right way to collaborate on complex budgeting and forecasting tasks.

Am I really proposing that we all immediately stop opening Excel and building out those tables, tabs, and lookups? Of course not. Spreadsheets will remain a cornerstone solution on everyone's computer for all sorts of data challenges until interactive cubes in the metaverse consign those files to the trashcan icon.

However, there is a change happening... Programming languages like Python are as easy to to learn and use as Excel and they are teasing away the data scientists and analysts from spreadsheets. Not only that, but new wave planning applications are integrating Excel, Python and R into their user interfaces. Soon, those data collection, cleansing and analysis functions that are typically performed outside applications will be done inside them.

For complex planning problems, those gigabyte files that are worked on by multiple users merging myriads of incompatible datasets across many time zones to tight schedules... well, it's time to break free. Consider specific modern cloud solutions rather than the closed shop of traditional enterprise vendors. Concerned about the vast amounts of structured and unstructured data that you have? Use Hadoop. Worried about replicating the black-box mathematics of your incumbent tool? There are libraries of algorithms in R or Python that you can download, plugin and activate.

Frustrated by the lack of post game analysis that you can do in spreadsheets? Lag measures galore await you in cloud land. Real scenario planning too! Then there's tournament mode functionality to evaluate algorithms and machine learning drivers not to forget the ability to create multiple plans and scenarios. Evaluating the right gap closure course of action will no longer be an impossible pipe-dream.

Don't want to be tied to a cloud software vendor? Then use a subscription model. The future of planning is open source and outside-in providing greater efficiency, transparency, and sustainability. Project Zebra will change the landscape of supply chain planning. In the future, swapping from one cloud provider to another will be like changing your energy supplier.

Next generation software can be implemented remotely, quickly and deliver planning capability that can be

Integrated

Collaborative

Adaptive

Efficient

Relevant

Accurate

Stop planning in spreadsheets and start mining, analysing, planning, and collaborating on the cloud.