News - 01 Dec: Up and Away - less trapped by spreadsheets

Companies are feeling a little less trapped by spreadsheets these days.

Larry Reader's patience had worn thin. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that too many financial decisions rested on homegrown spreadsheets packed with too much impenetrable data and too few answers. The result was a crippling condition that Reader calls "spreadsheet overload" but which many others refer to as "spreadsheet hell."

Reader, the CFO of Duke Manufacturing, a privately held manufacturer of commercial-food-service equipment for restaurants, hospitals, and schools, was about to join the I'm-fed-up-with-spreadsheets club. Membership often hinges on a sudden realization that, for all their virtues, spreadsheets are the IT equivalent of a screwdriver: useful for many things but too often employed for the wrong chore simply because they happen to be close at hand. And cheap.

But as anyone who has ever used a screwdriver to chisel wood, poke holes, scrape paint, or pry things apart knows all too well, sooner or later they break under the strain of all that misuse.

That was the case at Duke, where an already stretched finance department would assemble spreadsheet data, key it into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and then spend far too much time tracing the sources of resulting errors. "It was difficult to determine where the original data even came from," says Reader. "Forecasting and budgeting were tough activities, to say the least."

That has long been a common lament, and has, over the years, pushed companies to explore a range of business intelligence (BI) software applications to either augment spreadsheets or, at bolder companies, virtually replace them. That slow migration got a boost from the Internet, as companies began to realize that Web-based BI software allowed a new freedom in how users input and shared the data at the heart of most budgeting-and-forecasting operations.

Read the full article.