The Spreadsheet Was Supposed to Be Temporary

By Streamliners Studio

Picture a production planner opening a spreadsheet before the first shift.

Orders come from the ERP. Material availability comes from another report. Machine capacity needs a conversation with the floor supervisor. A customer has changed a delivery date, and someone has emailed a revised priority list.

The planner brings everything together and decides what the plant should run next.

The spreadsheet began as a practical solution to a specific gap. Over time, more decisions moved into the file. More people became dependent on the person maintaining it.

Eventually, a temporary workaround became part of the operating model.

When we evaluate a workflow like this, we want to understand why the workaround is still necessary and whether the economics of replacing it have changed.

AI is giving us more ways to address that question.

The business is already paying for the workaround

We begin by examining the work required to keep the process running.

Who collects the information? How often does someone check it? What happens when an order changes? Which decisions depend on one person knowing something the system does not capture?

A spreadsheet can be an excellent place to explore a problem. Teams can change assumptions, test calculations, and learn which information matters.

The economics become different when the same manual work repeats every day.