Wait until the seventh

Asking the users rather than the vendor

The population was commercial and sales management plus product line management, across two business segments and three regions. The tools in scope were the business intelligence platform, the enterprise data warehouse, and the spreadsheet reports supplied by the controlling team.

A survey went to a target population of 150 to 200 and returned 120 responses, with group response rates between 58 and 64 per cent. Twenty in depth interviews ran alongside it.

Everything on this page is self reported. There is no system usage log and no observed timing. That is a real limit and it is stated rather than smoothed over.

The corporate tool is not where the work happens

Spreadsheets are used daily by 74 per cent of product line staff and 60 per cent of sales staff. The business intelligence platform is used daily by a third of sales staff. The data warehouse is mostly either never opened or checked weekly, and a third of sales staff never open it at all.

On the split of time, about seventy per cent of managers spend around ninety per cent of their reporting time in spreadsheets and about ten per cent in the platform. The remaining thirty per cent split their time roughly evenly.

The efficiency verdict is close to inverted between the two. Ninety per cent of interviewees called the spreadsheet reports time efficient and five per cent did not. Eighty five per cent said the platform is not time efficient and fifteen per cent said it is.

What people are doing in spreadsheets that they cannot do in the platform

Ninety four per cent of interviewees prefer to filter in a spreadsheet, by customer, by district, by period. Forty four per cent build pivot tables there and thirty eight per cent do calculations.

The conclusion both user groups reached independently is the useful frame: the platform is a reporting tool and the spreadsheet is an analysis tool. The platform shows what happened. The spreadsheet is where somebody works out why.

The information itself is mostly present. Asked what was missing, the largest single answer was nothing further. The problem is not gaps, it is that people cannot find what is already there. Three quarters of interviewees reported information search problems, and the named cause is the number of tools in use rather than any one tool being bad. The people who work inside a single tool report no search problems at all.

The cost numbers disagree, and everybody knows

The largest single group of pain points is costs, and it is a sales problem: nine of eleven sales interviewees raised cost variance.

The causes named are mundane and compounding. Manual allocation mistakes. A purchase order that should be spread across three months allocated to one. Different exchange rates in different tools. The gap between standard and actual cost. Revenue is consistent across tools. Gross margin, contribution margin and freight cost are not.

Hence the workaround in the title. Users had learned to wait until the seventh of each month before trusting the cost report, because before that the two tools disagree. Freight cost lives in only one system, is missing a route and its lead time, and takes almost a week to obtain. Gross margin has to be recalculated by hand because the price list updates more slowly than cost does.

Training is the cause underneath most of the others

Three quarters of interviewees raised the lack of training unprompted, and the analysis records a high correlation between training and every other pain point.

Seventy per cent of what people know about these tools they worked out alone, and thirty per cent came from asking a colleague. The worst point is the start of a new role, and communication about new reports was rated insufficient by 29 per cent of respondents, with the gap specifically at role and department changes: no store of information about new reports, no explanation of useful practice.

On how they would want to learn, the top two answers were from a manager or colleague, and short videos or e-learning. Formal training in a large group came fourth of five.

Four recommendations, and one of them is uncomfortable

Replace the business intelligence platform with something faster, and run organised training at the start of a job role. The consideration attached is honest: the spreadsheet reports were rated superior on speed, depth of detail and the sheer number of filtering options, so a replacement has to beat a spreadsheet, not just beat the incumbent.

Add the specific missing items, and set up a monthly exchange where product management supplies market conditions and price changes to sales, and sales supplies customer information back.

Merge or synchronise the tools, which the analysis flags as requiring an examination of the system hierarchy and significant change, not a configuration exercise.

And fix cost visibility: break variable costs into components, give freight cost lead time estimates, improve the accuracy of manual allocation, and record a change history that explains why variances happen. The consideration there is that showing variable cost components may cut across who is allowed to see what, so access rights have to be looked at first.

There is no measured result in this work. Nothing was replaced, merged or retrained during the sprint, and no time or cost saving is claimed.