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Businesses are losing time, money and resources as decision makers drown in spreadsheet data. Spreadsheet junkies can make or break a business.

Andy Honess, UK Managing Director, QlikTech, explains why businesses need to wean themselves off complex spreadsheets to reveal a true picture of business health without going cold turkey and losing the essential visibility of their day to day operations.

Analyst Group Quocirca estimates that about 60 per cent of organisations depend on spreadsheets for a host of vital business activities, including monitoring and forecasting performance against budgets . It’s a staggering statistic. Why are businesses relying on inflexible and difficult methods to build such a fundamental picture of organisational health? Why have intelligence tools failed to convert data into business information? Complex spreadsheets are difficult – or at times impossible – to access, understand or analyse accurately, yet hold sway in thousands of organisations.

The fundamental issue with the use of spreadsheets is a suffocating amount of data, making manual on-the-fly analysis extremely difficult. Spreadsheets are open to invisible mistakes and users cannot easily identify inaccuracies. They lack the ability to drill down, so it’s difficult for decision makers to relate different sets of data, such as customer records and individual invoices. To make matters worse, time is wasted discussing the validity of data and its origins, further tampering with the decision making process of business critical issues.

To build a picture; imagine a situation where a sales director needs to find out how many umbrellas have been sold over the summer, by region, type and returns. He needs this information to forecast sales for the autumn and to effectively re-order the right number for manufacture. Getting this wrong can cost the business dear; over or under ordering as a result of drowning in spreadsheet data is not an option.

Rehabilitating spreadsheet junkies to take control of the situation is no longer an insurmountable feat. Businesses should consider the options presented by next-generation business intelligence (BI) technologies.

BI has been around since the early 1980s, but many businesses have become disillusioned by technologies that have promised to transform business managers into enlightened corporate soothsayers. In fact, traditional BI solutions are so complex that often only the technology savviest IT managers are able to use them. And, often they are not a viable option for many businesses apart from large enterprises, as they cost hundreds of thousands to implement. To top it all off, traditional BI tools take up to 18 months to put in place, and have a success rate of just 35 per cent.

What businesses need to get control of unwieldy data locked in spreadsheets are technologies that don’t require IT staff to analyse data but can be used by anyone, with minimal training. New generation BI technologies enable accurate and user-friendly analysis and reporting of many millions of data records via interactive dashboards, in minutes, and essentially give decision makers the power back to make informed, profitable decisions.

Another bonus is that these technologies cost half the money in comparison to traditional BI tools, can be put in place in days and have a success rate of almost 100 per cent. This makes them a viable option for businesses of all types and sizes without making a huge dent in their IT budgets, and at last deliver what all businesses crave – a single version of the truth.

Ultimately, next-generation BI enables everyone across any organisation – from risk analysts to customer relationship managers and sales reps – to access business critical information instantly and easily, linking related data and navigating analysis in the same way as people think. It takes away the risk of making wrong decisions because of inaccurate data or painfully slow analytics processes. It also prevents decision makers from becoming addicted to the spreadsheet.

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Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Remedies for Spreadsheet Junkies