Commentary: The ubiquity of Excel

Transportation and logistics professionals still use Excel on a daily basis and while it is a powerful tool, the program doesn’t allow information to be shared within and across enterprises.    American Shipper has been benchmarking supply chains since 2008, but sometimes it’s just as instructive to get in front of a group of people.
   You get a chance to see what they do, what their concerns are, and (just as importantly) see what they’re interested in. This week, I had the fortune to speak to the Jacksonville CSCMP Roundtable about technology usage in the transportation and logistics industry.
   One of the first questions I asked was simple: who uses Excel spreadsheets on a daily basis? The response was emphatic. Nearly all of the 50 or so people in the crowd raised their hands.
   If I was in the crowd, I would have raised my hand too. The reality is Excel is a core tool for nearly every business, and transportation and logistics is no different.
   It’s a powerful tool, especially in the hands of experienced, knowledgeable users. But Excel has its limits, and most of them have to do with how networkable the information contained in those documents is.
   Most data in spreadsheets is essentially locked within the users’ hands. Let me be clear – it’s not only locked within the organization, or even the transportation department. It’s locked within the document. To share that information across colleagues or departments requires an email.
   Say a transportation analyst crunches numbers on a spreadsheet about which carriers to use. That analyst finds an anomaly that could save the company thousands of dollars. The analyst emails the spreadsheet to the director of transportation. After emailing the document, the analyst looks again at the spreadsheet and finds some other cost savings, then emails the updated spreadsheet to the director.
   Now there are two versions of the document in play. Neither is accessible real-time by multiple employees within the transportation department. Neither is accessible by other departments. And certainly, neither is accessible to the company’s outside partners, like its 3PL.
   Our research in 2014 found that anywhere from one in five to one in three transportation departments are still mostly (if not wholly) dependent on Excel or spreadsheets.
   And seeing virtually every hand in the audience go up at the CSCMP event this week really crystallized this picture.