Sie sind auf Seite 1von 5

Spreadsheet Heaven

Theres a certain irony to one of the trends sweeping across the market for
business performance management (BPM) tools. The humble spreadsheet
heavily criticized by makers of specialist BPM software is making a comeback.
And intriguingly, it is the BPM vendors themselves who are pushing
spreadsheets back up to the coalface of finance.
For the past 25 years, finance departments the world over have relied on
electronic spreadsheets especially Microsoft Excel to handle tasks such as
budgeting, planning, reporting, and forecasting. Accountants and analysts have
grown to love the simple, intuitive workings of spreadsheet programs, and to
prize the ease they bring to business modeling. Indeed, many observers reckon
that electronic spreadsheets were the killer application that drove the
phenomenal spread of the desktop PC.
But as companies grew in size and complexity over the past two decades, and as
the need for better and faster information increased, the shortcomings of Excel
as a BPM tool started to outweigh the benefits. For a start, spreadsheet
programs dont scale well they are poor at accommodating lots of different
users, and struggle to consolidate data files from many different sources. Issues
such as data security and workflow management are equally troublesome.
It is for this reason that a new breed of dedicated BPM software has sprung up
in recent years. Playing on a theme of Excel hell, companies such as Hyperion,
SAS Institute, Business Objects, and Cognos have all released software aimed at
providing the perfect BPM solution for finance teams. Effortlessly pulling in
data from across the company, such products promised powerful analysis and
reporting capabilities with none of the challenges inherent to mere
spreadsheets.
But after years of bashing electronic spreadsheets, vendors of BPM software
have undergone something of an about-face in recent months. Rather than
distancing themselves from Excel, suppliers of BPM tools have started to
embrace the arch-enemy as their new best friend.

The reason? Client demand, says John Van Decker, a financial software
analyst at Meta Group, a U.S.-based IT research firm. Finance teams recognize
the advantages that BPM software gives them, but theyre still really addicted to
Excel.
Much of that addiction stems from the fact that spreadsheets offer a range of
benefits that BPM software has been unable to match. In particular,
spreadsheets offer unparalleled flexibility when it comes to building business
models. Users, for example, can tailor their spreadsheets with complex formulas
and functions in a way that traditional BPM solutions have often proved too
rigid to emulate.
Robert Kugel, a director at Ventana Research, another IT research firm in the
US, agrees with Van Decker. In our recent research, he says, we found
Microsoft Excel functionality was the most important feature users were looking
for in a dedicated budgeting and planning application.
He highlights the fact that many companies have developed planning or
operational models in Microsoft Excel that they dont want to give up. And then
theres the fact that finance staff feel so comfortable with the Excel environment
that they are reluctant to learn a new system.

BPM vendors have long offered a degree of integration with Excel, with many
software packages able to upload spreadsheet files into a centralized planning
and budgeting database and then export reports back into Excel. However, the
working environment itself wasnt Excel, and when spreadsheets were uploaded,
formulas and formatting were often lost.
Excellent Software
To address their clients passion for spreadsheets, many BPM vendors have
decided to put Excel at the heart of their offerings. This process, of bolting a
spreadsheet to a centralized computer system, gives rise to what Ventanas
Kugel calls enterprise spreadsheets. The result is the best of Excel and the best
of BPM in one package.
SAS Institute, for example, unveiled the latest version of its Financial
Management suite of software in October last year and in the process dropped
its web-based front-end in favor of Excel as the main interface for data entry
and reporting in its budgeting software. The system still sits on our SAS
architecture, but now the front-end has all the look and feel of Excel, explains
Bill Lee, managing director of SAS Institute in Singapore.
Users are able to manage their budgeting and reporting in a spreadsheet
environment, but without any of the traditional Excel headaches. For example,
says Lee: Our solution provides a full audit trail. You can see exactly who
changed a formula and when. And rather than having lots of different staff
working on many different budget spreadsheets, the union of SAS and Excel
means that finance teams only ever have one version of the truth, all managed
and controlled by the SAS software that sits behind the Excel interface.
Cognos took a similar step in June last year by upgrading its Excel add-in.
Now, users of Cognoss planning software can not only import and export
spreadsheet files, they can also run the whole planning function in an Excel
environment. Once again, Cognos software sits behind the Excel user interface,
providing the rules that govern the process, adding functionality, and managing
the consolidation and storage of planning data.
Forest Palmer, managing director of Cognos in Asia, says that using Excel lets
customers address the inevitable diversity that exists within a large firm. By
introducing the Excel add-in, staff in different business units can take our
centralized planning model and customize it to a much greater degree to fit their
own particular operating environment, he says.
Russell Pennington, vice president of planning and budgeting at Trinsic, a
US$251 million-a-year telco in the United States, is a fan of the Excel/Cognos
link-up. When your employees including the CEO can easily perform
sophisticated analysis, modeling, and planning without having to know
anything other than Excel, that completely changes the game of true, enterprise-
wide planning, he enthuses.
Giving Excel Wings
Zarina Peperdi, vice-president of finance and human resources for SIA Cargo, a
S$2.5 billion-a-year (US$1.5 billion) subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, is another
convert. For years, she and her team used Excel to carry out profitability
analysis on her companys 80 international cargo routes. It was a gargantuan
task. Every cost item, from fuel burned, to landing and parking fees at different
airports, to the cost of depreciation and operating licenses for aircraft had to be
broken down for each route and matched against revenues.
But just as many other companies have found, Peperdi grew increasingly
frustrated with the shortfalls of Excel. We were having difficulty keeping track
of who was making changes, when, and to what, she recalls, not to mention
questions of data security, and issues of users over-personalizing their
spreadsheets.
To help improve the process, Peperdi installed a BPM solution from SRC
Software and went live with it in early 2004. One of her chief criteria in
choosing a BPM solution was Excel compatibility, and in SRC, Peperdi found
what she needed.
Indeed, ever since being launched in the United States 20 years ago, SRC
Software products have always used Excel as their user interface, with the
software primarily acting as the rules and logic that connect the spreadsheet
front-end to a back-end database, usually from Oracle or Microsofts SQL
Server.
Tom Malone, CEO of SRC Software, says his company was often derided in the
past as being merely Excel on steroids. But now, with BPM vendors tripping
over themselves to boost their Excel credentials, he feels its he who is having
the last laugh. Within five years, all performance management software will
have Excel as its primary user interface, he predicts.
For Peperdi, having a BPM package based around Excel has brought numerous
benefits. There is the high level of flexibility, for one. We need a lot of scope to
run what-if scenarios, to compare different time periods, and to slice and dice
our data, she says.
Peperdi also values the ease of installing and using the new system. People are
very familiar with Excel. It took almost no training to install the software
because everybody knew it already, she notes.
As one commentator puts it: In the past, the CFO of a company was often also
the CEO the Chief Excel Officer. Now it looks set to stay that way.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen