Podcast: Let’s Play Spreadsheet Golf

In this episode of Weaver: Beyond the Numbers, our host discusses the process that is most ripe for automation and identifies where to find the worst technology-enabled area in your organization.

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Detailed Description of Weaver: Beyond the Numbers, Let’s Play Spreadsheet Golf

00:00:00
Morgan: Welcome back y’all. So today I’m going to play a game with you. It’s called spreadsheet golf. Rules of the game are just like normal golf. You want to know the process that is most ripe for automation and the places you need to look for your worst technology-enabled area. You look for the place that has the most Excel spreadsheets.

00:00:21
Morgan: One of the things I want to share with you in thinking about Excel. Excel is a chaos enabler, and this is coming from a guy who used to be an accountant. I love Excel, it’s one of my favorite things, but when people operate and live within Excel, they don’t operate and live within an enterprise grade process and management style. And so, everything is a custom design, everything is a custom build and you lose the ability to get efficiencies in that process. And then you wind up with everything from broken formulas that get to the CFO, and they look at it and go, this number is wrong, to the Excel wheel of death. Some people have these massive schedules that they load up and you get the little blue spinning wheel, and it never stops.

00:01:09
Morgan: One of the things I want to share with you about Excel is 66% of professionals in a recent research article look at a spreadsheet at least once per hour and on average they have 2.6 spreadsheets open on their computer at any given time. When you do the math on that, it winds up being almost nine hours per week of an individual looking and operating within a spreadsheet. And so, when you scale that up and think about your organization, that means one out of every five employees isn’t doing anything besides looking and working in a spreadsheet. If you ask me, that’s a pretty big efficiency drain. I would much rather those employees be focused on moving my business forward, to doing those things that generate the revenue or save the expenses for my organization, rather than operating in Excel and creating a pretty workbook.

00:02:14
Morgan: One of my favorite things about Excel is reports that don’t reconcile because it’s not enterprise grade. All of a sudden, you’re having all of these issues arguing in meetings about Jim Bob has number X and Sally Sue has number Y, and nobody can align on what the actual number should be so the decision can be made, and your business can move forward.

00:02:37
Morgan: So how do you fix this? How do you make it public on these things that need to be corrected? Part of that goes into your transformation program. Being able to identify, here is our process, our worst offender processes, and here’s how we’re going to improve them.

00:02:53
Morgan: And when you look at it from a return on investment perspective, if you have ten people working in that process that are having to operate within those spreadsheets that means you have $100,000 to $200,000 of compensation doing nothing but working spreadsheets. When you look at it in that light, spending $50,000 to do a low code solution, or maybe it’s even less than that, to be able to reduce that Excel demand in that organization, not only enhances your resiliency, but it significantly reduces the complexity of your process.

00:03:33
Morgan: So, one of the ways you’re seeing this happen, and it’s happening across all facets of industry, is this concept of operational data stores. I love this because for years people have done data warehouses and they’re big and they’re expensive, and a lot of people don’t feel like they really get out of it what they want. Then you have the data lake come and everybody’s like, the data lake is great. Then the data lake fills full of trash and then people can’t find what they need. So here comes the operational data store.

00:04:03
Morgan: It’s really about creating a knowledge domain, or each of the key elements of information that a person would need to do that job and then having that be focused on an objective. So, in my organization, I want the information to do x, y and z. Your whole data architecture and structure is designed to answer those three questions, so an Excel spreadsheet is no longer necessary. That information is served up consistently and reliably to your organization.

00:04:37
Morgan: So, let’s all play a little bit of spreadsheet golf. Take a look at our processes and let’s find those key areas that we can actually improve our organization. Thank y’all.