In my decade-plus working with Enterprise sSolutions, I’ve consistently heard about the pain points of using manual, Sshadow Excel systems that drive critical operational functions in virtually every company. With each new breakthrough in enterprise technology, expensive software is purchased and delivered, yet continually fails to replace offline spreadsheets. It’s so persistent, that Forbes recently coined it “the most dangerous software on the planet.”

The latest trend has been the rapid growth of SaaS software solutions, business-friendly nature touted as the latest Excel replacement due ito theirs business -friendly nature. YEvetn so, research has shown that spreadsheets are still the dominant fool for managing business processes. While many software vendors attribute this to issues with “user familiarity” or “poor change management,” feedback from clients has shown that SaaS applications and other IT driven systems are simply failing to meet business requirements.

Across our practice, we’ve analyzed dozens of actual scenarios when we’ve encountereding Excel being's used as an operational tool, in situations where the potential impact is greater than 1 million dollars. Aggregating across these examples, we’ve found three dominant pain points where modern software solutions have failed the business:

Accessing and Modeling Data:
In the majority of use cases we have consulted on, the manpower allocated to manual shadow systems or offline spreadsheet work is related to accessing, merging, and manipulating data. Oftentimes, this data needs to be modeled to reflect unique business logic –, a customization not possible with the rigid nature of multi-tenant SaaS applications and too difficult with cumbersome ERP modules. In other cases, the problem is that information isn’ot in a format that can be easily automated, such as data that is manually collected within non-standardized spreadsheets.

Aligning with Internal Processes/Workflows:
Sometimes SaaS applications have little difficulty accessing, displaying, visualizing, and interacting with information. The challenge lies in the unique business processes that ultimately result in the ability to make correct decisions and take action. The heavy standardization of SaaS based solutions, means they typically have a “hardwired” process aligning with their suggested best practices which can be --an unrealistic expectation for most operational functions.

Front End Design for Specific Use Cases:
In each of these situations, the end goal is for a user to make an optimal decision or take the most effective course of action. For different organizations, triggering that action is dependent on a wide variety of factors including environment, process, work style, organizational structure, and so on. For a solution to become actionable, it’s critical to leverage user-centered design that fits the unique workflow of each organization. Unfortunately, the majority of SaaS applications struggle to accomplish this, again due to the limited flexibility of multi-tenant architectures.

Despite the shortcomings of ERP and SaaS solutions, the fact is that shadow systems and spreadsheets are unreliable, uncontrolled, and present tremendous financial risk. So how do successful organizations move to automated systems that reliably and effectively improve operations? Moving forward, we’ll continue the conversation and review specific, creative solutions we have seen effectively replace “Operational Excel.”