Enterprise software users prefer Excel... what can vendors do about that?

My experience is essentially with med/small biz.

- I don't think age has something to do with it. If your ERP does not allow you to enter the info the way you want or produce a report the way you need, you'll inevitably resort to other means to get the job done, being 25 or 75 years old makes no difference.
- Use of spreadsheets is just one symptom. Other symptoms are small databases, Word docs, etc... i.e. any tool that will help you bridge the gap between what your ERP can do and what you want to do.

excerpt from one of my previous answers:
/--------------
... users have found ways and workarounds to do their work with less pain and nonsense. They subsequently continue to spend time and effort devising ways to bridge the gap between the system and the company’s evolving business processes by using multiple spreadsheets, databases, 3rd party addons, electronic files, etc... . They do it because they need to and the system is not following. This process goes unnoticed because it takes place slowly, everyday and bit by bit. SAP’s payroll is no longer adequate? No problem, new spreadsheets are built and maintained by the payroll person or a 3rd party addon is purchased. The sales process has changed or gotten more complex and MS Dynamics or Sage is too complicated or heavy to reconfigure? No problem, another series of spreadsheets is created by the sales department. Revisit the company two years later and you are guaranteed to find an ERP that’s patched up and stitched from nearly every side. ...
--------------/

I have not yet seen a system (ERP or Accounting) without a parallel system running alongside it. In many cases, these parallel systems have become so dense that the ERP is simply unusable without it. This is particularly true in the Services sector where processes are more complex, fluid and subject to changes overtime.

... then why would organizations purchase them in the first place?
Keeping your overworked, overheated, clunky current system is not a way of life, marrying an ERP is no easy life either. It's only after a year or two that you can start to see if your ERP is working for you. This is probably the time, one night, to gaze at the stars and ponder over a question that was posted earlier by Michael Krigsman
“ Was your ERP system "worth it "? ”

The short answer is to simply pay closer attention to their customers.

Enterprise software purchases are an interesting conundrum. Incentives run in the wrong direction on both sides of the table so solutions don’t ultimately meet customer needs.

On the customer side of the table, there’s a general unwillingness to divert resources from operations and commit them to accurately documenting their processes and needs. It seems much easier to place the responsibility on the person trying to sell a product. “We’ll let them do the leg-work” is the mindset too often.

On the vendor side, the pre-sales consulting and sales teams are trying to close the deal with as little resource expenditure (time and money) as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that, keeping the total cost of goods sold low is just good business.

The problem here though is that nobody is actually committed to finding out what the current state and desired states are and should be. In both my consulting and staff experience, it’s been relatively rare that either side (vendor or customer) is really committed to comprehensive needs assessment and gap analysis.

The end result is an incomplete and/or inaccurate list of requirements that someone put together and checked off to show that “due diligence” effort was completed. This in turn leads to solutions with gaps that end up getting filled by Excel or Access.

In my opinion, the problem is ultimately a customer problem. Though the vendor can encourage the customer to dig a little deeper and figure out exactly what they need, doing so is effectively asking to cut their margin and give it back to the customer which really doesn’t make sense.

Using Excel instead of the Enterprise Application usually happens in companies for two reasons. ONE: The application is old and out of date - data is not easily accessible. TWO: The information needed to run the business, meet the goals of the company were not defined or have changed and are now not in alignment with what the system can provide.

More often than not it isn't users avoiding using the system, it is more about they need information and have no way to get it. My company sees this with clients all the time. Gaps between the business operations, the IT systems and the goals of the companies. All working their hardest to meet their goals yet none are working together to achieve a synonymous goal. Company employees are down in the trenches, fighting fires every day, working hard to get the job done. Requirements change, circumstances change and how they adapt to these changes causes a ripple effect to other areas of the company. Executives set goals based on forecasts and opportunities but structures and processes are set and achieving these goals requires insight and often change.

Just like covering a leaking window with plastic is only a temporary solution; many companies find work around solutions to deal with everyday issues. There comes a point when stopping, stepping back and realigning all the operations is the best solution and achieves the highest success for the company to meet and exceed its goals.

Many of the software solutions today are built with integration to Office products and even have the ability to easily connection isolated systems so that ease of obtaining valuable information can be right at your fingertips. For example, Infor Global Solutions has gone away from the old clunky systems and has built a whole new look at ERP which helps get away from the issues with going outside to excel to get your answers yet gives users the ability to interact with excel under ERP conditions. The best of both worlds.

To solve the problem businesses need to step away and look at both... newer systems and alignment of processes and goals.

Theresa Kramarz
www.tlcgroupinc.com
www.discretemanufacturingerp.com

The reason Excel is so widely used is because the legacy enterprise apps you've listed don't function the way the user needs. It could be a report, it could be a process, it could be data that the legacy app doesn't track...whatever...it doesn't fit. The ease of use, power and agility of Excel is essential in enterprise applications. Legacy applications weren't meant to be any of those things.

IT shudders because these spreadsheets can be filled with valuable data, erroneous calculations and lack the enterprise standard integrity such as the ERP provides. Operations has a tingle run up their leg as these spreadsheets allow them to shape technology to meet their need. The two don't have to be at odds with each other. Operations isn't going to give up the ease of use, flexibility, power, etc. of Excel...accept that notion as gospel. IT better recognize a new way to allow the Subject Matter Experts that work for their company (not outside consultants or software vendors) to fulfill their need for constant, pervasive and permanent change AND achieve the enterprise stability, control and consolidation they desire.

I was just in a meeting yesterday where the COO, SVP and VP invited the CIO to participate in a review of a solution for their Operation. The CIO said, 'as long as you don't need my resources...go ahead'. The rather clandestine use of Excel is now being replaced by blatant disregard for what IT attempts to dictate as Cloud/SaaS solutions provide the benefits of Excel in an enterprise application.

IT better start to look at their role differently - and quickly. Instead of trying to constrain the business 'because that isn't how the ERP does it', they should version freeze their current legacy application and begin to finally align with business. If not, they will find themselves further marginalized (as Excel has been doing subversively for decades) and eventually their positions will disappear into the Cloud.

The "Age" question may be also be related to a "control" problem. Excel is great since just about anyone can do just about anything, whenever they want. The "big red flag" may be the “lack-of-ease” of changing those big ERP systems, but I’m convinced it is related to controls (or lack thereof) when it comes to managing the changes in spreadsheets. Those of us over the age of 35 most likely have implemented some great spreadsheet functionality and got burned (or at least heard of someone who did) when the “simplest of changes” have caused embarrassment in a board room or with a boss or with an ex-prospect!
Users usually don’t know what they want until after they see what they asked for!! It’s been that way forever and I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon. My view is that Excel will serve as that interim tool until “the cows come home”. Especially since its use is so pervasive!!!
I have some experience with a product called ChangePro that compares spreadsheets and quickly identifies formula changes. Doesn’t solve the problem, but life becomes a lot easier when comparing against a base version.

We've come upon this time and time in our benchmarks. It's not about age. Users just prefer the familiar control, look and feel of the Excel interface.

Our conclusion? Enterprise software vendors - especially for planning: make your user interface excel-like.

On the flip side, for other applications, they should be as easy to use as an app. What someone from SAP describes as "consumer-grade usability".

I would align and summarize that if they switch to Excel, the user adoption battle is long lost, and they switch because the Enterprise App doesn't let them do what it is supposed to do (ie, perform the tasks of their job). Time and again we see in CRM the Enterprise App is supposed to reflect the process of the user group, but reflects nothing of the sort since no real analysis was ever undertaken and if it was, the conclusions were often ignored. Excel fills the gaps in the process flow. You could extend this in the CRM world to look at why so many CRM systems are replaced in the end by Outlook, and why CRM vendors spend so much effort trying to "seamlessly" squeeze their App into Outlook.

From a solution perspective Business "Rules" tools are in their infancy but maturing quickly. Some of them integrate flexible "rules engines" together with the ERP system and allow for MS Excel upload and download options.

I'm currently starting to work with one from SAP called "BRFPlus" (Business Rules Framework Plus) and while it is VERY promising, and does not require any coding, it is still a bit cumbersome and will take some time to fully mature. However this goes a long way to bringing huge amounts of genuine processing flexibility to SAP's flagship ERP product.

On the other front, I can only speak for SAP since that is what I work with, but they do provide pre-defined code modules they call "function modules" for integrating Excel into transactional processing.

So in essence either a) create bridge functionality to integrate Excel processing into the transactional process, or b) develop a flexible substitute (like a "rules engine") which can handle the Excel type data manipulation users are looking for and then be able to feed that back into the transactional system.

With well over 500 million users around the globe, it’s no wonder that spreadsheets are the de-facto Business Intelligence/ Analytics application.

Many companies have no choice but to use spreadsheets because their BI solution does not provide the strategic answers Marketing, Sales and Management need to grow the business. These companies typically populate their BI with internal raw data from the ERP. This is only half of the story. People in strategic areas need other original sources of data not found in the transaction system.

They need to access external market intelligence to compare it with company performance metrics. This can be market and customer segmentation, updated customer and competitor merger and acquisition status, competitive opportunities, business and products under threat, market size, etc. Unfortunately, this information usually only resides in market intelligence spreadsheets developed by Marketing, Sales or Finance. full article http://bit.ly/Aknk7z

Regards, Bill

Excel gives people the illusion that they can do anything they need with it. You can add your own columns, calculations, merge cells, etc, which you cannot easily do in enterprise software. But Excel is only good for people who don't collaborate much and are not very interested in analyzing the data they create.

There are no real workflows in Excel and you cannot apply business rules. I'll have to disagree with Bill when he says that spreadsheets can be used for analytics (not to mention BI). First of all, because you don't have all the data in the same place. Also because updates of the information are performed by people manually, which can create huge issues.

And the problem with people using a simple, available, time-tested tool is . . .? And, the incentive to vendors to re-invent the wheel in order to make a battleship as nimble as a speedboat is . . .?

Easy interfaces might be nice, but some days it might feel to users that the walls are closing in when thinking about the prospect of doing everything great and small with a powerful tool designed to be superb at the great, and less-focused on the small.

The biggest problem with using Excel are the lack of controls that typically sends auditors "up the wall". There is an interesting tool from Litera called "Change Pro for Excel" that allows you build controls over the use of Excel in less than a minute (identify only formula changes, produce an audit trail, and allow you do document the validation and approval process). You should check it out.

This is a complex issue. Having experienced it first hand, I can comfortably argue both sides of the discussion.

When business users create their own spread-marts (spreadsheet data-marts) it’s simply because corporate BI solutions have failed to deliver what they need.

In many companies BI is deployed to support mainly Accounting, Finance and Operations while leaving behind the strategic activities they need to fuel growth. As a result, Marketing, Sales, R&D and Strategic Management do not have what they need and have two choices:

1) Rely on their business analysts to create their own spread-marts to clean, organize, look-up, structure, pivot and summarize data in a way that can answer their questions.

2) Or continue to make decisions the old fashion way:based on experience and intuition NOT data. http://bit.ly/wKgP8K

At the same time, IT's concern is understandable. According to research the amount of errors people make in spreadsheets is seriously disturbing. http://bit.ly/GLHMe6

Therefore there is a need to have clean data, that makes business sense, in the data sources to prevent the report manipulation and re-calculation that takes place when business analysts need to make adjustments and correct the data errors of every report in Excel.

This situation is in great part fueling the growth of self-serve BI tools that are bridging the gap between IT and Business users’ needs.

According to TDWI, "demand for business intelligence and analytics continues to be strong, but expectations are changing. Users want easy-to-use, self-service, and graphical environments that let them work interactively with and explore different types of data. But organizations struggle to meet such elevated expectations with most existing BI systems. This has created a prime opportunity for data discovery tools, which offer a fresh approach to data access, reporting, and analytics". http://bit.ly/qiFiyr

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant http://bit.ly/yETJHh and a survey by Dresner corroborate this increasing trend. http://tinyurl.com/3j2r3qy

Regards, Bill

Most of these answers are very good so instead of beating a dead horse, I'm just going to highlight some things.

Someone commented that people don't switch because implementation costs are too high. That's not the case for a cloud hosted Saas based solution.

Excel is also what they are pushing in college, so familiarity is key for users. This can be negated by an entirely customization solution. Many solutions claim they can be customized, but that's usually on a company wide basis. Find a solution that the user him/herself can customize their own role based screen.

Also, finding a solution that can link your eCommerce, CRM and ERPs in one database allows for a shortened company wide learning curve. When everyone is using the same solution to manage the entire business process, there is a more natural ebb and flow.

Download a free white paper from www.entegr8.com

You are right, Casey. Solutions these days are more affordable and SaaS offers companies a new way to afford a more efficient solution. Many solutions offer excel options or even excel type options that have the same flexibility as Excel but with better controls and integrity.

Uniformity and user based customizations offer a world of flexibility while mantaining better processes. ERP, CRM solutions today are not like the antiquated awkward solutions of the past and Excel is fast becoming an outdated answer to these solutions and a sign of rigid and old processes.

Theresa Kramarz
www.discretemanufacturingerp.com
www.tlcgroupinc.com

Excel is my go to answer for just about anything. It the backbone for any "system" I design for a client. It like comfort food: always the same (except for the latest version), always there and constant. It is a powerful tool that produces results as long as your computer has enough processing power and memory to handle all the power this program can weld. IF the ERPs could be more user friendly and more similar in application. Look at SAP or AS400; last time I used it you had to do 5-8 steps for one simple result. That is not user friendly. You have F keys to remember that change by application. There is no continuity or GUI between these systems. Use a window based program and once you know the icons, you can use anything that is built on the same premise. Most of these big systems each "march to their own drum" making it a true learning experience for the user. Keep it simple and consistent; your users will remain with you longer.