The £20,000 Problem Hiding in a Spreadsheet

One of the most expensive machines in your factory might be a spreadsheet.

A production coordinator will often spend time every day pulling figures from ERP, getting information from colleagues, updating Excel reports, checking emails and sending the latest numbers to management.

Lets be conservative and call it an hours work.

An hour doesn't sound like much.

But over 250 working days, that's 250 hours a year.

At £25 an hour, that's more than £6,000 for one person, before accounting for mistakes, duplicated work or the time spent correcting them.

Do that across three people and you're approaching £20,000 a year on a process that creates no product.

And sometimes the cost isn't just time.

One Australian steel manufacturer relied on a complex Excel workbook to plan production across its facilities. The spreadsheet had grown over years, contained extensive formulas and VBA code, and had become a critical part of daily operations. It was also increasingly difficult to maintain and carried significant risk of spreadsheet error.

This is how operational inefficiency often develops.

Not through one obviously broken process, but through hundreds of small tasks that have simply become “the way we do things.”

• Copying data.

• Re-keying orders.

• Updating reports.

• Chasing information.

• Checking spreadsheets.

• Reconciling two systems that should already agree.

  
  

Because sometimes the quickest improvement in a factory isn't a new machine or a major software project.

It's removing the 30-minute job that everyone has stopped noticing.