Excel… the Pervasive Hidden Tool

Allen Ray

As ERPs age and new ones come on line for on-site install and Cloud, there is one piece of software coupled with a package that has become a de facto standard for most distributors to upload price matrix.

Excel is that product, coupled with others in the Microsoft Office Professional grouping.

It is so widely used that most distributor sales personnel, who may or may not be good at math, routinely depend on Excel as a communication tool for prices and figuring their commissions. For some it is hard to believe that Excel has become the bedrock of productivity tool for sales, marketing and corporate level personnel.

To illustrate, much research between distributors and their vendors is almost always done using Excel. The by product of research done by us when working on a major price management project over several years that focused on measuring productivity improvement within a distributor, yielded this nugget of information about Excel’s usage.

•    MS Excel was used 99% of the time in file sharing (Access was a very small %)
•    MS Word and Outlook were used 97% of the time
•    good old PowerPoint was used 99.5% of the time to illustrate pie charts and other information graphically
•    time and again we heard that some sales people who weren’t really good with math were great using Excel

So what does it say when some ERP systems recognize that they “must” be able to import Excel files?

With increasing time demands due to competition, sales people can’t stand in line at the IT shop to upload a complex price matrix and SPAs. Newer ERP systems must have the ability to not only download Excel files, they must have the ability to upload files and tag customer records with spreadsheets, voice messages and other important documents quickly. Newer ERP platforms and the software that runs on them must have Bi-Directionalism as part of the standard offering for distributors to improve their productivity.

Bi-directionalism (import/export) is when a person, who has security permission, is be able to export and import Excel sheets, but isalso able to tag customer records with Outlook, Word, web conversations, shipment documents, and any other document that relates to the customer’s order(s). With most sales people having smartphones and tablets, now they have mobile points of sale that require the same access to release and modify orders, adjust prices and look at all of a customer’s history.

So has Excel become a bedrock piece of software in your daily business? In this study, the high usage rate of Excel suggests that it could be. To improve distributor productivity, bi-directionalism is critical and needs to be an embedded feature of your ERP system.

Allen Ray is President of Allen Ray Associates, Ltd., which helps businesses discover and create productivity plans for sound growth while helping to creating demand. As a former owner of both a distribution and contracting business, Allen Ray offers a unique view as “we have been there and done that” while maintaining a leading edge approach to both sides of the market place; www.allenray.com