We learn it from an early age, its use is widespread and it’s incredibly divisive. We are, of course, talking about Excel. Whether you love it or loathe it, we’re all familiar with it, and it’s a relatively simple tool to use. It’s a stalwart part of most tech stacks and for small businesses it can revolutionise working processes. However, as organisations start to grow, cracks begin to show. This is especially true when it comes to balanced scorecards.
In a multi-site organisation, the data you’re processing for your balanced scorecards can be vast, held across complex hierarchies and numerous locations. This often means data is manually transferred back and forth. Not only is this approach massively time-consuming, but it's prone to human error, makes controlling access difficult, faces performance issues and sensitive information is put at risk. But how do you know when the time is right to make the move to a more secure and efficient balanced scorecard solution?
From our experience of chatting with many multi-site organisations, we know that the use of Excel is still widespread. KPMG cited that 47% of organisations record their sustainability data in spreadsheets (*), but it was also recognised that investing in effective data management capabilities is a top priority in this area. This indicates an awareness that Excel isn’t the ideal tool, but the transition away from it is slow. To help you identify if it’s the time to make the switch, we’ve put together six signs to look out for…
1. The business has grown exponentially
As alluded to previously, Excel is best suited for smaller businesses. Although a cost-effective solution, Excel was not explicitly designed for balanced scorecards, and this is apparent when growing organisations continue to use it and problems arise. Frustratingly, problems quickly multiply, and the data becomes unwieldy. If you’re at this stage, now’s the time to scale your systems and create a single source of truth for your data to give you a unified view of your network’s performance. By adding automation to your balanced scorecard software to manage the day-to-day, your team can focus on more complex tasks, as well as setting actions to drive improvements.
2. No real-time insights
Are you getting frustrated with the constant need to send emails back and forth with the latest versions of various Excel documents? Trying to do this across an entire network is frankly just not sustainable.
With business performance management software you can grant access to the relevant stakeholders and ensure they’re seeing the same data at the same point in time. The benefits of having access to real-time insights include the ability to react more effectively to the market, resolve potential issues rapidly, and take advantage of opportunities. Additionally, better data-led decisions can be made, leading to improved business operations and an enhanced customer experience.
3. Lack of strategic consistency
Do you find that sites within your network seem to be working towards different goals and their ‘look and feel’ is vastly different from one another? When data performance is being recorded in Excel this is a very siloed approach, so it’s easy to understand why there’s a lack of consistency.
Once a more holistic stance is taken to balanced scorecards, organisations gain a deeper understanding of where the network is underperforming and how best practice can be shared. Being able to do this via one transparent application boosts trust in the data.
4. Poor communication and limited collaboration
Using Excel, over an interactive balanced scorecard software solution will have a detrimental effect on collaboration across your network locations. If your Area Managers are spending their time reviewing various Excel charts, amalgamating data and then sending emails, you’re not allowing them to fully optimise their time.
Not only can Head Office use centralised balanced scorecards to fuel efficiencies, but actions can be set and monitored through the solution. Rather than trying to dig out the email you sent to a retailer last week, you can instead track the communication within the tool. This has a two-fold benefit in that it also gives you a quick and easily accessible auditable record.
5. Unreliable visibility of site performance
Once data sets are large, which is often the case for multi-site organisations, Excel is famously vulnerable to error, as The Fintech Times warns:
“Size limits on Excel spreadsheets led UK officials to miss nearly 16,000 positive covid-19 cases. Copy-paste errors were partly responsible for the infamous London Whale incident, which triggered a staggering $6 billion in losses by JPMorgan.”
We find that although many companies are still using Excel, they are doing so full of apprehension. They’re aware that handling data this way is risky and ultimately, they want to ensure that the right information is in front of the right people, at the right time. With more advanced technology the local teams also get better visibility of their performance and can become more accountable.
6. Limited innovation
A lack of appetite to adopt advanced technology and reluctance to change will hamper an organisation’s ability to keep up with competition. Difficulties arise when you have resistors to change, especially if the project appears overwhelming. The Harvard Business Review offers some fascinating insights into this and suggests how a team can move to a change-ready mindset.
Using purpose-built software to manage your balanced scorecards and choosing a provider that can skilfully guide you through the process, will alleviate some of the worries. Once the team are less impeded by manually managing data, they can focus on driving innovation and improvements, making the challenging work worthwhile.
A core part of Loop’s business performance management tool is a Balanced Scorecard software module. Our team are experts at gathering and cleaning messy data, even within complex networks. We work with many automotive brands and recently investigated ‘5 Best Practices for Automotive Balanced Scorecards in 2024’, offering useful insights that will resonate with many multi-site organisations.
Source: *Addressing the Strategy Execution Gap in Sustainability Reporting (kpmg.com)
