OPEN Shorts: The Swiss Army Knife of Ops
Listen to our Founder and Chief Quality Engineer, Marshall Williams, in this video short about the challenges of using spreadsheets to manage your quality and supplier performance teams.
Video Transcript
Hi everyone, I just wanted to take a minute to talk about the Swiss Army knife of industrial manufacturing. This is a great way to think about it: Excel. During my time in industrial manufacturing, I found that Excel really gets treated like the Swiss Army knife, the technology tool to solve all of the problems of the day. It can be good, but it can also be a pretty big hindrance.
An organization’s operations are measured and rewarded based on being on time and on budget. In the real world, it often seems like an impossible task, but it happens every week. The challenge is that operations are not designed or measured on testing out technology, and the very notion of that detracts from the on-time and on-budget objectives of operations. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens when operations use Excel as a technology solution.
Excel is great for solving the problems of today, but it is not a technology solution. It doesn’t scale across your business, it’s not robust, and it’s really crappy at sharing information. It’s not intended to have process change built in. You may find some workarounds, but eventually, it’s going to break.
Open deploys with a light touch to operations and replaces or integrates with all of that historical data that you have collected in Excel. The best part is that we’re going to help you solve the problems that you’re trying to solve using those Excel spreadsheets and really remove the problem from some time off in the very near future. We are going to make it really easy to remove that problem from the process, just as easy as it was to deal with the problem in Excel in the past. But you’ll have a robust solution in place that will scale across your business. Ultimately, we’re going to bring speed, transparency, and clarity to you and your team.
